Utah Code § 75A-9-101 et seq. · Utah
Utah: how to sign your advance directive
Utah replaced its advance directive law with a new Uniform Health Care Decisions Act, 2025 c. 439, effective 1 January 2026. Every section of ch. 75A-9 carries that date on its face. A Utah form built from anything older is built on the previous act.
Why WearableDocs
In Utah, the directive has to be found
It does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate — but a document no one can produce when asked for is a document that fails in practice. WearableDocs puts the signed directive on a card you carry and a page that opens in seconds, instead of a phone call to whoever might know which drawer.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Utah asks
What you need to sign in Utah
- Instruments
- One advance health care directive — a health care instruction, a power of attorney for health care, or both in the same record
- Form
- Optional — §75A-9-110: "The following form may be used to create an advance health care directive."
- Execution
- One adult witness. No notary option (§75A-9-107(4)). Presence includes real-time audio-video, and also audio-only where the individual's identity is personally known to the witness or authenticated by accurate answers (§75A-9-107(5))
- May not witness
- Your agent; your agent's spouse or cohabitant; and, if you reside or receive care in a nursing home or assisted living facility, its owner, operator, employee or contractor
- May not be your agent
- Someone a court finds poses a danger to your well-being, even if no protective order issues; an owner, operator, employee or contractor of a nursing home or assisted living facility where you reside or receive care — unless a family member, your cohabitant, or a descendant of your cohabitant
- Copy rule
- None found in the captured chapter. No copy-equivalence rule appears in §§75A-9-102 to -113
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate. A health care professional to whom you communicate an instruction must document it in the medical record (§75A-9-106(2)). Caveat: §75A-9-114 and above are not captured, so a copy or reliance rule there is not excluded
- Who decides
- Capacity is presumed (§75A-9-103(1)). It is rebutted only by a contemporaneous examination finding, documented in a signed record giving cause, nature, extent and probable duration — made by a physician, psychologist or other authorized practitioner, and never by a family member, your cohabitant or their descendant, or your surrogate
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18
- Revocation
- A later health care instruction that conflicts with an earlier one revokes the earlier one to the extent of the conflict (§75A-9-106(3))
- Oral instructions
- An oral objection counts. A person found to lack capacity may object "by orally informing a responsible health care professional", in a record, or by any other act clearly indicating objection (§75A-9-104(3)). A disqualification of a default surrogate may be communicated verbally or nonverbally (§75A-9-113(1)(b))
- Objection rule
- §75A-9-104(4)–(5). An objection restores the presumption of capacity. A second finding of incapacity cannot rebut it where the individual "is requesting the provision or continuation of life-sustaining treatment" and the finding is being used to withhold or withdraw it
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive — and see below
- Citation
- Utah Code § 75A-9-101 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Utah actually recognizes
The instrument is one advance health care directive, and Utah is relaxed about its shape. A health care instruction "may be in the same record as a power of attorney for health care" (§75A-9-106(4)), and a power of attorney "may include a health care instruction" (§75A-9-107(6)). Instructions, an agent, or both. The form at §75A-9-110 is optional — the statute says it "may be used."
What makes Utah different is not the instrument. It is that capacity is presumed, and the person it is presumed about gets the last word.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Utah
"Get two witnesses, or a notary." Utah needs one adult witness and has no notary option at all (§75A-9-107(4)). The witness must reasonably believe the act is voluntary and knowing, must not be the agent or the agent's spouse or cohabitant, and must be present when you sign. The rule was tightened, not loosened, in 2026 — and the same section now accepts presence by audio-only connection where your identity is personally known to the witness or established by accurate answers (§75A-9-107(5)). A nationally-produced form telling a Utahn to find two witnesses, or to see a notary, is asking for work the statute does not require.
"Once they find you lack capacity, that is the end of it." Utah presumes capacity, and the presumption comes back. A person found to lack capacity may object — orally, to a responsible health care professional — and the finding is then "not sufficient to rebut a presumption of capacity" (§75A-9-104(4)). And there is a hard stop at §75A-9-104(5): a second finding of incapacity cannot be used to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment that the individual is requesting.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Utah
Utah gives the person's own voice more force than the document — capacity is presumed, an oral objection restores it — and it gives neither a carried directive nor a carried copy any legal force. Every section of ch. 75A-9 from -102 to -113 was read; no copy-equivalence, reliance or device provision appears in any of them. Sections above §75A-9-114 are not in the corpus, so absence beyond what was read cannot be asserted — but nothing in the operative text reaches a bracelet, a card or a display.
There is one Utah rule that does something the other states' device statutes do, and it is worth stating precisely because it is not a device rule at all. Utah makes the person's own voice superior to the document. Capacity is presumed; an oral objection restores it; and a second finding of incapacity cannot withdraw treatment the patient is asking for (§75A-9-104). That is a stronger protection than a bracelet statute, and it is not about carrying anything.
What is left for the card in Utah is what it does everywhere else in the findability states: it gets the directive in front of the clinician who has to document it under §75A-9-106(2), and it does so before a capacity finding gets made without it. Nothing more should be claimed for it here.