Child Labor Laws: An Employer Guide to Hiring Minors

Most employers who violate child labor law are not trying to. They hire a sixteen year old for the summer, put a fourteen year old on the schedule after seven in the evening in October, or let a seventeen year old take the delivery van because it is Tuesday and somebody has to. The intent is irrelevant. The penalty attaches to the fact.

What makes this area genuinely difficult is not the law itself, which is short and knowable. It is that the rules are split across two levels that interact in a specific way, the tightest restrictions turn on facts about a school district you do not control, and the numbers change depending on whether the minor is fourteen or sixteen, whether school is in session, and what month it is.

This guide covers the federal framework by age bracket, the hour rules in detail, the jobs that are off limits, how state law overrides federal, what you have to keep on file, and what violations actually cost. It is written for the owner or office manager who is personally responsible for compliance without a legal department behind them. I build the scheduling records and employee files this depends on at FirstHR. This is general information rather than legal advice, and child labor rules change frequently at both levels, so verify current requirements before you act.

What Are Child Labor Laws?

Child labor laws are the federal and state rules that set a minimum working age, limit the hours and times of day minors may work, and prohibit them from specific dangerous occupations. The federal layer comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and is enforced by the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division. Every state has its own layer on top.

The stated purpose is worth keeping in mind because it explains why the rules are shaped the way they are: the provisions exist to stop work from interfering with education and to keep young workers out of jobs likely to hurt them. That is why the tightest restrictions apply during the school year, why they key off school hours rather than business hours, and why the prohibited occupation list is about machinery and heights rather than about difficulty.

Which Employers Are Covered

Assume you are covered. The exceptions are narrower than the phrasing suggests, and the most common way a small employer gets this wrong is by concluding that a revenue threshold lets them out.

Federal child labor provisions reach enterprises with an annual dollar volume of business of at least $500,000. They also reach individual employees engaged in interstate commerce or handling, selling, or otherwise working on goods that have moved in interstate commerce, which in practice covers a very large share of businesses below that revenue line. Handling credit card transactions, ordering supplies from out of state, or shipping anything across a state border can be enough.

Then there is the state layer, which frequently has no revenue threshold at all and applies to any employer with employees. So the practical answer for a small business is that federal coverage is likely and state coverage is near certain. If you are hiring for a small business and considering a teenager for the summer, assume the rules reach you.

The Rules by Age Bracket

Federal child labor law sorts into four brackets, and almost every practical question resolves to knowing which bracket someone is in.

The bracket that trips employers up is 16 and 17, for the opposite reason to the one you would expect. There are no federal hour limits at all, which people read as no limits, and then their state turns out to prohibit work past 10 p.m. on a school night. Federal silence is not permission; it just means the question is answered somewhere else, which is why how many hours a 16 year old can work has a different answer in every state.

Note also that the minimum age applies to the work, not to the payroll status. Classifying a young worker as an independent contractor does not move them out of these rules, and misclassification adds a second violation on top of the first.

The Hour Rules That Cause Most Violations

The direct answer, for federal non-agricultural work: 14 and 15 year olds may work no more than 3 hours on a school day, 18 hours in a school week, 8 hours on a non-school day, and 40 hours in a non-school week, only outside school hours, and only between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., extended to 9 p.m. from June 1 through Labor Day. Workers 16 and older have no federal hour restrictions.

Two details in that table do more damage than the numbers themselves.

The first is that a school day includes Friday. The three-hour cap applies to Friday afternoon exactly as it applies to Tuesday, and a Friday evening shift in a restaurant is the single most common way a compliant schedule becomes a violation.

There is a limited exception worth knowing: 14 and 15 year olds enrolled in an approved Work Experience and Career Exploration Program may work up to 23 hours in a school week and 3 hours on school days, including during school hours. That is a formal program with an official authorization, not something you arrange with a parent.

For everything else, the practical implication is that the compliance work here is a scheduling problem rather than a legal one. You are not going to be caught out by not knowing the law. You are going to be caught out because a manager filled a gap on a Friday, and nothing in your process stopped it.

Jobs Minors Cannot Do

The Secretary of Labor has declared a set of occupations too hazardous for anyone under 18. These apply regardless of hours, regardless of parental permission, and regardless of how capable the individual is.

Beyond that list, workers aged 14 and 15 operate under a much stricter rule: the permitted jobs are enumerated, and anything not specifically permitted is prohibited. Retail work including cashiering and shelving, office and clerical work, most food service and kitchen work short of cooking, bagging and carrying out, and clean-up work using vacuums are on the allowed list. Baking is not. Cooking is allowed only in limited circumstances. Operating a slicer, a mixer, or a fryer with a device that automatically lowers and raises the basket has specific rules attached, and they are the specific rules that a restaurant will violate first.

The Department of Labor Fact Sheet 43 is the definitive short reference on all of this and is worth reading in full before you hire anyone under 16. It is a few pages long and it is the exact document an investigator is working from.

State Law and the Stricter-Standard Rule

The governing principle is simple and it has no exceptions: where federal and state child labor standards differ, the more protective standard applies. You do not get to pick, and following federal law is not a defense against a state violation.

What varies by state is substantial. Minimum ages for particular jobs, hour and nightwork limits for 16 and 17 year olds where federal law is silent, meal and rest break requirements specific to minors, permit and certificate requirements, and prohibited occupations beyond the federal list. The Department of Labor state pages are the starting point, but the state labor agency itself is the authority.

The column that matters most is the third one. On the two questions employers most often ask about older teens, how late they can work and how many hours, federal law says nothing at all, which means the answer is entirely a state question and a national article cannot answer it for you.

If you employ minors in more than one state, treat each state separately. This is the same discipline that HR compliance requires everywhere else, and the same reason a single company-wide policy set to the strictest state is often the cheaper option than maintaining several.

Work Permits and Age Certificates

There is no federal work permit. Roughly half of states require one, under names including employment certificate, work permit, and age certificate, and the mechanics differ enough to catch out employers who have hired minors elsewhere.

In some states the school issues the permit and the student initiates it. In others the state labor department issues it. In several the employer has to sign a statement of intent to employ before the permit can be issued at all, which means your paperwork is on the critical path and a start date can slip because of it. A handful of states have moved to online registration systems that the employer must use directly.

Where no permit is required, the burden shifts entirely to you to establish and document age. That happens through ordinary hiring paperwork, and the identity documents collected during I-9 verification will usually establish it. Note the sequencing: you need age established before the first shift, not before the first paycheck.

Fold the permit step into your standard new hire paperwork rather than treating it as a special case. Employers who handle it ad hoc are the ones who discover on a Monday that the certificate takes a week.

Pay Rules for Minors

Minors are entitled to the applicable minimum wage and to overtime on the same terms as any other non-exempt employee. There is no general discount for being young.

There is one narrow exception. Federal law permits a youth minimum wage of $4.25 per hour for employees under 20 during their first 90 consecutive calendar days of employment with an employer. The conditions are strict: it is 90 consecutive calendar days rather than 90 worked days, it ends the moment the employee turns 20 whichever comes first, and an employer may not displace other employees in order to use it. Many states set a higher floor that eliminates the option entirely.

Everything else follows ordinary wage and hour rules. If a state requires meal or rest breaks for minors specifically, those are additional obligations rather than substitutes, and unpaid break time still has to be recorded accurately.

What You Must Keep on File

Record keeping is where a defensible position is built or lost, and it is the part employers do most casually. An investigation does not ask what your policy was. It asks what your records show.

The second item on that list is the one that separates compliant employers from exposed ones. A total hours figure cannot demonstrate compliance with a rule that restricts times of day, so a payroll export showing eighteen hours for the week proves nothing about whether any of them fell after 7 p.m. Your timesheet needs start and stop times per day, and it needs to be kept.

Three sheets, because the three things that go wrong are separate. The first records who is a minor, what proves it, and what duties were approved. The second is the hours log with start and stop times rather than totals. The third is the one nobody builds: the four dates that change what is legal while your schedule stays exactly the same.

Keep these alongside the rest of the personnel file and apply your normal retention schedule, checking whether your state sets a longer period for minor employment records specifically. Several do.

Before You Hire a Minor

The sequence below is short and it takes an hour the first time. After that it is a template.

Step seven is the cheapest insurance on the page. Three of those four dates are known the day you hire, and every one of them changes the rules while your schedule stays the same.

What Violations Actually Cost

Federal civil money penalties for child labor violations are set by regulation and adjusted annually for inflation. Per 29 CFR 579.1, the current maximums are up to $16,035 for each employee who was the subject of a child labor violation, and up to $72,876 for each violation causing the death or serious injury of an employee under 18, an amount that may be doubled where the violation is repeated or willful.

The structure matters more than the headline number. The penalty attaches per affected employee, which means a single scheduling practice applied across four minors is not one exposure, it is four. That is how a modest restaurant ends up with a six-figure assessment for hours violations that nobody thought were serious.

State penalties apply in addition to federal ones and several states have increased theirs substantially. Both levels can assess for the same underlying conduct, and neither reduces the other.

The costs that do not appear in any penalty table are worth naming too: the investigation itself consumes weeks of somebody's time, findings against a business are frequently published by name in a press release, and a repeat finding moves you into willful territory where the multiplier applies.

Where Small Employers Get Caught

The violations that actually happen at small companies are boringly consistent.

Summer hours running into the school year is first. The rules genuinely change on two dates, Labor Day for the evening extension and whenever the local district resumes for the hour caps, and the schedule usually does not. Any business that leans on seasonal employment should treat those two dates as hard deadlines.

Friday is second. The three-hour school-day cap includes Friday, and Friday evening is exactly when a restaurant or retail location most wants an extra pair of hands.

Equipment is third, and it is the one most likely to produce a serious finding rather than a technical one. A 15 year old operating a slicer, a 17 year old on a forklift or a compactor, anyone under 18 sent up to clear a gutter. These are hazardous occupation violations and they carry the higher exposure.

Driving is fourth and is widely misunderstood. Occasional incidental driving by a 17 year old is permitted only under tightly defined conditions. Driving as a regular part of the job is not, and neither is any driving at all by a 16 year old.

Then there are the quieter ones. Relying on what a parent said about the age. Recording total hours without start and stop times, which leaves you unable to prove compliance even when you complied. Assuming a revenue threshold exempts you. Treating a minor as a contractor. And letting the shift-assigning manager operate without ever being told the four numbers, which is the mechanism behind almost everything above.

None of this requires a compliance function to solve. It requires the birthdate to be visible where the schedule gets built, the permitted-duty list to be written down once, and four dates in a calendar. That is the whole system, and it is the same infrastructure that makes the rest of HR at a small business function without a specialist.

Frequently Asked Questions