What Can My Teen Legally Do at Work?

What this tool actually does

There are seventeen federal Hazardous Occupations Orders. They sit at 29 CFR Part 570, Subpart E, and they are the list of things the Secretary of Labor has declared too dangerous for anyone under 18 to do for pay. Almost nothing written for parents goes near them, and what does exist tends to compress the whole subject into one sentence: your teenager has to be 18. That sentence is wrong often enough to matter.

The tool works from the regulation. You pick an age band and a task, and it reports which order covers that task, what the order actually reaches, whether that order carries the apprentice and student-learner exemption, and what the exemption would require if it does. Every answer carries the citation and a link to the section text on eCFR, so you can read the words yourself. That is the point. A parent who has read 29 CFR 570.67 once is better armed than a parent holding a summary of it.

The three answers, and why the middle one exists

Most content on this subject gives you two states: allowed or not allowed. The regulation has a third, and it is the one that changes lives.

Prohibited means the order covers the work and there is no way through it. Driving for work, logging and sawmill work, wrecking and demolition, and the whole of Order 7, which reaches hoists and manlifts but also forklifts, skid steers, Bobcat loaders, backhoes and front-end loaders, all sit here for 16 and 17 year olds. So do explosives, mining, radiation, bakery machines and brick and tile work. No apprenticeship helps. No school program helps. No signature from you helps. The duty falls on the employer and the employer cannot contract out of it.

Prohibited unless the teenager is a registered apprentice or a student-learner means the order contains a sentence saying it does not apply to apprentices or student-learners employed under the conditions in 29 CFR 570.50(b) and (c). Roofing is the famous one, and it is why the flat claim that you must be 18 to go on a roof is not the law. But the exemption is not a permission slip. It requires that the hazardous work be incidental to the training, intermittent, for short periods, and under the direct and close supervision of a journeyman, and it requires actual registration with the Office of Apprenticeship or a recognised state agency. A 17 year old apprentice cannot be put on a roof for eight hours a day. Read the roofing rules in full if that is your situation.

Allowed only on conditions covers the two places where the regulation opens a specific, enumerated door: the driving exception for 17 year olds, which 29 CFR 570.52(b) sets out as nine numbered conditions, and the loading-only provision for scrap paper balers and paper box compactors. Both are lists, and both lists have to be satisfied whole.

There is a fourth thing the tool will tell you, which is that it does not know. That answer is now reserved for one case: a task nobody has put on the list. The tool says so and sends you to the section text rather than guessing.

The trap almost nobody sees: the lift is not the roof, and the machine is not the trench

Here is the single most useful thing on this page. Roofing, at HO 16, carries the apprentice and student-learner exemption. Power-driven hoisting apparatus, at HO 7, does not.

So a registered 17 year old apprentice may lawfully do roof work under the written conditions, and may not operate or ride the scissor lift, boom lift or manlift that would get them up there. Same jobsite, same afternoon, two different orders, two different answers. Employers blur these constantly, usually in good faith, because the exemption feels like it should apply to the whole task. It applies to the order it is written into and nowhere else.

Order 7 is also wider than its nickname suggests, and this is where families get caught. The first line of 29 CFR 570.58 bars operating, tending, riding upon, working from, repairing, servicing or disassembling an elevator, crane, derrick, hoist or high-lift truck, and the regulation then defines high-lift truck by name: fork lifts, fork trucks, fork lift trucks, tiering trucks, backhoes, front-end loaders, skid loaders, skid-steer loaders, Bobcat loaders and stacking trucks. Low-lift trucks that move material without tiering it are outside the definition. Everything else on that list is inside it, and none of it is exemptible.

That produces the split that catches good employers. Trench and excavation work is Order 17 and it does carry the exemption, so a registered apprentice may, under the written conditions, dig and backfill. The skid steer or backhoe that digs the trench is Order 7, and no 16 or 17 year old may operate it, ride on it or work from it, apprentice or not. Trench yes, machine no. Reasoning the other way round, from the trench being allowed to the machine being allowed, is one of the most common real-world violations in construction.

The same asymmetry runs through the saw orders. A registered apprentice may, under the conditions, use a reciprocating saw or an angle grinder with a cut-off wheel. The same teenager cannot run the wood chipper if the work is logging, because HO 4 has no exemption at all.

A worked example

Vera is 16 and has a summer offer from a gutter cleaning and installation company near home. It is illustrative, but the shape of it is common. Her mother assumes this is fine, because it is not roofing and the work is mostly done from a ladder.

The tool gives a different answer. Gutter and downspout work is named explicitly inside the definition of work on or about a roof at 29 CFR 570.67, and DOL’s Fact Sheet 74 extends the rules to standing or working on a ladder or scaffold at or near the roof. So the answer is prohibited, unless Vera is a registered apprentice or a student-learner meeting the written conditions. She is neither. She is a 16 year old with a summer job offer.

That is not the end of it, and this is the useful part. Her mother now has something specific to say to the employer, and the employer, who genuinely did not know, moves the offer off the job sites altogether: taking bookings and doing the invoicing in the office, and keeping the yard and the stock racks in order at the depot.

Simply putting her on the ground would not have been enough, and that is the trap in this one. The definition of roofing operations at 29 CFR 570.67 expressly reaches all jobs on the ground related to roofing operations, naming the roofing laborer, the helper, the materials handler and tending a tar heater. So feeding material up, footing a ladder or clearing debris under the eaves sits inside Order 16 just as much as standing on the roof does. What makes the revised offer work is that none of it is attached to a roofing job at all. Nobody had to be accused of anything. The regulation did the arguing.

The full list, for reference

This table is here so the page is usable without JavaScript and so you can see the shape of the whole thing. The exemption column means the apprentice and student-learner exemption at 29 CFR 570.50(b) and (c). Seven orders carry it. DOL’s Fact Sheet 43 lists them exhaustively: “The regulations provide a limited exemption from HOs 5, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 17 for apprentices and student-learners who are at least 16 years of age and enrolled in approved programs.” Every other order is a no.

Order	Section	What it covers, in short	Exemption
HO 1	570.51	Plants making or storing explosives	No
HO 2	570.52	Motor-vehicle driver and outside helper	No
HO 3	570.53	Coal mining	No
HO 4	570.54	Forest fire work, timber, logging, sawmills	No
HO 5	570.55	Power-driven woodworking machines	Yes
HO 6	570.57	Radioactive substances and ionizing radiation	No
HO 7	570.58	Power-driven hoisting apparatus, including forklifts, skid steers, Bobcat loaders, backhoes and front-end loaders	No
HO 8	570.59	Metal forming, punching and shearing machines	Yes
HO 9	570.60	Mining other than coal	No
HO 10	570.61	Meat processing machines and slaughtering	Yes
HO 11	570.62	Bakery machines	No
HO 12	570.63	Balers, compactors and paper-products machines	Yes
HO 13	570.64	Brick, tile and kindred products	No
HO 14	570.65	Circular, band, chain and reciprocating saws, chippers, discs	Yes
HO 15	570.66	Wrecking, demolition and shipbreaking	No
HO 16	570.67	Roofing operations and work on or about a roof	Yes
HO 17	570.68	Excavation operations	Yes

There is no section 570.56. Order 6 lives at 570.57, which looks like a typo and is not.

An earlier version of this table said “not verified for this site” against Orders 1, 3, 6, 9, 11 and 13, because the research file behind the site had not opened those six sections. Fact Sheet 43’s list settles all six, and 29 CFR 570.62 confirms Order 11 directly: the bakery machines section has no exemption sentence in it at all. The rows now read no, which is the answer.

What this tool cannot do

It cannot tell you what your state says, and your state is often the binding answer. It cannot tell you whether a particular employer’s version of a task falls inside a particular definition, because that is a judgement about facts and the regulation is written in general terms. It cannot tell you whether a program calling itself an apprenticeship is registered, which is a question for your state apprenticeship agency or the Office of Apprenticeship. And it is not legal advice about your teenager’s job.

What it can do is stop the conversation being a guess. Print the result, take it to the employer, and ask the two questions that follow from it: which order do you think applies here, and is this teenager registered. If the employer cannot answer either one, you have learned something.

If something has already gone wrong

Child labor complaints to the Wage and Hour Division are free and confidential. A safety complaint to OSHA can be filed online, by phone or by letter, in any language, and can be filed anonymously, though OSHA says a signed complaint is more likely to result in an onsite inspection. Retaliation complaints are a separate filing with a much shorter deadline. There is more on all of this, including what the narrow right to refuse actually requires, in what your teen can do if a job feels unsafe.