Youth Apprenticeships in High School

Most parents have never heard of this route, and the reason is not that it is obscure or experimental. It is that it is assembled locally, so there is no national brand name attached to it and nothing arrives in the post about it. In one state your school district may run a substantial program with dozens of employers. Twenty miles across a state line there may be nothing at all.

That unevenness is the honest headline, and this page is mostly about how to find out which situation you are in.

What is a registered youth apprenticeship?

It is a registered apprenticeship whose apprentice happens to be in high school. The legal machinery is identical to the adult version, and that is the point.

Federal rules define an apprentice as “A worker at least 16 years of age” employed to learn an apprenticeable occupation. There is no separate junior category and no watered down version. If the program is registered, the standards behind it must contain the same required elements as any other: a written outline of the work processes, a defined term, related technical instruction, and a progressively increasing schedule of wages.

So a youth apprentice is an employee. They are paid, they clock in, they have a supervisor and a written agreement, and they are simultaneously a high school student with a timetable.

How is it different from shop class or a co-op?

	Shop class or CTE course	Co-op placement	Registered youth apprenticeship
Employer	None	Yes	Yes
Paid	No	Usually	Yes, on a written wage schedule
Written agreement	No	Yes, if run properly	Yes, required
Defined term and hours	No	No	Yes
Credential at the end	School credit	School credit	Certificate of completion, plus credit
Registered with an agency	No	No	Yes

A co-op is not a lesser thing. It is a different thing, and for many families it is the sensible first step. But the distinction matters most in one specific place: what the federal child labor rules will let a 16 or 17 year old do on the job.

How does this interact with the child labor rules?

The Secretary of Labor has declared seventeen categories of work particularly hazardous for 16 and 17 year olds, and a lot of ordinary trade work sits inside them. Two exemptions can unlock some of that work, and they are not the same exemption.

The apprentice exemption applies to a young person registered as an apprentice. The student-learner exemption applies to a young person “enrolled in a course of study and training in a cooperative vocational training program under a recognized State or local educational authority”, or a substantially similar program at a private school. That second one is what a properly run school co-op is reaching for.

The student-learner exemption requires a written agreement, and the agreement has to say specific things: that the hazardous work is incidental to the training, that it is intermittent, for short periods, and under the direct and close supervision of a qualified and experienced person, that the school gives safety instruction which the employer correlates with the on the job training, and that a schedule of organised and progressive work processes has been prepared. The agreement must be signed by both the employer and the school coordinator, and both the school and the employer must keep a copy on file.

Ask to see that document. If the school cannot produce it, the exemption is not in place, whatever anyone believes.

Now the part that gets left out. Neither exemption is a general permission slip. It applies order by order, and it reaches only seven of the seventeen orders: DOL Fact Sheet 43 names them as Orders 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 17. The most important of the ten that carry nothing, for a construction jobsite, is Order 7, power driven hoisting apparatus. There is no apprentice or student-learner exemption in that section, and the section is broader than the word “hoisting” suggests. Alongside hoists, cranes and manlifts, it defines a high-lift truck to include fork lifts, tiering trucks, backhoes, front-end loaders, skid loaders, skid-steer loaders and Bobcat loaders.

So a 17 year old registered apprentice may, under conditions, do roof work, and may not ride the lift that gets the rest of the crew up there. The same teenager may, under conditions, dig and backfill a trench, because excavation is Order 17 and Order 17 is exemptible, and may not run the skid steer or backhoe that digs it, because the machine is Order 7 and Order 7 is not. Those are different rules sitting on the same afternoon and they genuinely do produce that result.

The same goes for driving. There is no apprentice exemption for motor vehicle driving, and a 16 year old may not drive on public roads for work at all. Our page on what power tools a 16 year old can legally use walks through the tool side of the same problem.

Is this actually growing, or is it a pilot?

It is growing, and the Department of Labor publishes the trend. In its November 2024 Trendlines analysis, DOL reported that the number of youth apprentices served rose by about 100,000 between fiscal years 2020 and 2024, and that the youth share of apprentices served rose by roughly 4 percentage points over that period, from 37 percent to 41 percent. Construction was the main driver, adding more than 45,000 young apprentices.

One caveat, and it is a big one: in that analysis “youth” means age 24 and younger, not under 18. Nobody should read 41 percent as meaning four in ten apprentices are teenagers. The direction of travel is real. The number is not a headcount of high school students.

How would I actually find one?

There is no single national list that will answer this cleanly, so work down this order.

1. Start with the school. Ask the counsellor, and then ask the career and technical education director, who is usually a different person and usually the one who knows. The exact question is: “Does the district have any registered apprenticeship placements, and who is the contact?”
2. Call your state apprenticeship agency. Federal rules define this as a state government agency authorised by the Office of Apprenticeship to register and oversee programs. States that have one run their own registration; states that do not are served directly by the federal Office of Apprenticeship. Either way, that office knows which sponsors in your state take high school students.
3. Search the Department of Labor’s apprenticeship site. Apprenticeship.gov hosts the federal program and job finders and the state office contacts.
4. Ask employers directly. Many sponsors are individual contractors, and a lot of programs never get advertised anywhere a parent would look.
5. Ask the union locals in your trade, who often run the largest registered programs in a region.

Expect a real possibility that the answer in your area is no. That is not a failure of the search. It is the state of the system, and it is better to know in October of junior year than in June of senior year.

What this looks like

The following example is illustrative.

Colton is 17 and in his last year of high school. Through his school’s CTE program he is placed with a mechanical contractor as a registered youth apprentice: sixteen hours a week during term, full time over the summer, with the classroom component delivered at the district technical centre.

Because the program is registered, three things are true. He has a written agreement and a wage schedule that steps up on a defined basis. His hours are logged against the program’s term. And where a hazardous occupations order carries the apprentice exemption, he can be trained on that work if it is incidental to his training, intermittent, short, and directly supervised by a journeyman.

Where it does not carry the exemption, nothing changes for him at all. When the crew brings in a lift, Colton stays off it and works from the ground, because the hoisting order has no apprentice exemption and being registered does not create one. His foreman knows that. His parents asked about it in the first week, which is why they know it too.

His transcript at graduation shows a diploma, a year of documented hours, and a wage that has already stepped up once. What happens next is covered in what a first year apprentice actually does.

The line that has to be here

This is general information, not legal advice. Federal law is a floor. Where a state child labor law is less restrictive than the federal law, the federal law applies, and where a state child labor law is more restrictive, the state law applies. Several states restrict hours and night work for 16 and 17 year olds where federal law does not. Check your state’s rules with your state labor department, and take any question with real consequences to them or to a lawyer.