How Many Hours Can a 14 or 15 Year Old Work?

By Jenna Hale · Last checked August 19, 2026

Most parents arrive at this question because a schedule has already been posted and something about it looks wrong. So here is the table first, and the explanation after it.

The federal limits for 14 and 15 year olds

Sixteen is the basic federal minimum age for employment. Fourteen and 15 year olds may work, but only in a limited set of non-hazardous, non-manufacturing jobs, and only outside school hours. They are also the only group federal law gives hour limits to at all. Those limits come from the Fair Labor Standards Act and are summarized in the Department of Labor’s Fact Sheet #43.

Two things about this table get missed constantly.

The first is that all work must happen outside school hours. A 15 year old cannot leave fourth period for a shift, even if the day’s total stays under 3 hours.

The second is that the daily and weekly caps stack rather than replace each other. Three hours on Monday through Friday is 15 hours, which leaves 3 hours for the entire weekend before the 18 hour weekly cap is hit. A manager who schedules 3 hours on five school days and then a 6 hour Saturday has written an illegal schedule, and it usually is not deliberate. It is arithmetic nobody did.

The 7 p.m. curfew and the summer extension

The time-of-day rule is the one employers break most often, because it does not feel like a rule about hours. It is a rule about the clock.

During the school year, a 14 or 15 year old may not be at work before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. From June 1 through Labor Day, the evening end moves to 9 p.m. and then moves back. Note the shape of that window: it starts on a fixed calendar date and ends on a floating holiday, so the summer rule does not run neatly with your school district’s summer.

This is worth saying out loud to a teenager who is about to be handed a schedule. The dinner rush is exactly when a restaurant wants extra hands, and 7 p.m. is exactly when the dinner rush starts. A 15 year old who is willing to stay late is not doing the employer a favor. They are creating a violation with the employer’s name on it.

These are federal minimums, and your state can be stricter

This is the single most important sentence on the page, so it gets its own section.

Everything above is the federal floor. States write their own child labor laws, many of them are tighter than the federal version, and the Department of Labor is explicit about what happens when they disagree: “Both Federal and State laws govern the employment of young workers and when both are applicable, the law with the stricter standard must be obeyed.”

In practice that means the federal table is the most work your teenager can legally do, never the amount they are entitled to do. A state may set an earlier evening cutoff, a lower weekly cap, a required break after a set number of hours, or a rule that only applies during the school term. Some states also require a work permit before the first shift, which is a separate state-level requirement with nothing federal behind it.

Two places to check your own state:

• The Department of Labor’s table of selected state child labor standards for minors under 18, which compares daily hours, weekly hours and nightwork limits across all states.
• Your own state’s labor department, reachable from the DOL’s state labor offices list. Searching for “[your state] department of labor youth employment” gets you there too.

We do not publish a fifty state hours table on this site, for the same reason we do not publish a fifty state work permit table: nobody has verified one recently enough to be worth trusting, the rules move, and pointing you at the primary source is more useful than a summary that is quietly eight months stale.

What changes at 16

At 16, the hour limits vanish from federal law completely. The Department of Labor’s language is that “sixteen- and 17-year-olds may be employed for unlimited hours in any occupation other than those declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor.”

No daily cap. No weekly cap. No evening curfew. A federally compliant schedule for a 16 year old could be a closing shift on a Tuesday during exam week.

Which is why, from 16 onward, the conversation stops being a legal one and becomes a household one. The law is no longer going to protect your teenager’s sleep or their grades. You are. That is worth deciding on purpose, before the first schedule goes up, rather than in an argument six weeks in.

Your state may still cap hours for 16 and 17 year olds, and quite a few do, particularly on school nights. Check the state table above before you assume otherwise.

At 16 and 17, the real constraint is the job, not the hours

Once hours are unlimited, the binding restriction becomes the hazardous occupations orders. Fact Sheet #43 states that there are currently 17 of these, each imposing a partial or total ban on the work it covers. They apply to everyone under 18.

The ones that catch ordinary teenage jobs are not the exotic ones:

• Driving a motor vehicle on the job. This is the big one. A 16 year old with a license generally may not drive as part of the job, and the narrow exception for some 17 year olds comes with conditions on distance, time of day, trip frequency and vehicle weight.
• Power-driven meat slicers and meat processing equipment. This bans the deli counter slicer at a lot of grocery stores, which surprises people every single time.
• Power-driven bakery machines. Relevant to the supermarket bakery, not just factories.
• Balers and compactors. The cardboard crusher at the back of nearly every retail store.
• Roofing and any work on or about a roof.
• Power-driven woodworking, metal-forming and circular or chain saws.
• Trenching, excavation, wrecking and demolition.

The practical version for a parent: an employer offering your 17 year old a job that involves driving, the compactor, or the slicer is offering something federal law does not allow, whatever their assistant manager says. Full details of all 17 orders are on the DOL fact sheet.

At 18, the federal youth employment provisions stop applying altogether.

One thing sits outside all of this. Casual work done directly for a household, such as babysitting for a neighbour or mowing lawns, is generally not covered by these provisions at all, which is why a 14 year old can babysit until midnight but cannot stack shelves after 7 p.m. That work brings its own complication, covered in babysitting, mowing and taxes.

What this looks like

Jonah is 15 and has been offered a job at a pizza place in October. The manager sends over a schedule: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., plus Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Two federal problems, before anyone gets to the state rules.

The weekday shifts are 4 hours on school days, which is over the 3 hour cap, and they run to 8 p.m., which is past the 7 p.m. cutoff for October. The Saturday shift, at 7 hours, is fine on its own as a non-school day. But the week now totals 19 hours, which is over the 18 hour school week cap.

A compliant version is 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on the three weekdays, which is 9 hours, plus up to 8 hours on Saturday. Eight is the ceiling there because Saturday is a non-school day, and 8 hours is the non-school-day cap in the table above. That puts the week at 17 hours, inside the 18 hour school-week cap. Jonah takes roughly 17 hours instead of 19, and his parents point out the part he had not worked out: the two hours he lost were going to be taxed like every other hour, so the gap in take-home pay is smaller than the gap in hours. That is the payroll tax bite he has not budgeted for anyway.

He does not love this. He does take the job.

Before the first shift

Hour limits are one of about eight things worth settling before a teenager starts work, and they are the one an employer is most likely to get wrong without meaning to. The rest, from the Social Security number to the W-4 to the conversation about where the money goes, is in the first job checklist.

This page is general information, not legal advice, and child labor rules change. Verify anything you plan to act on against the Department of Labor pages linked above or your own state’s labor department.