Work Permits and Age Certificates

There is nothing intricate about a work permit. The difficulty is that fifty-one separate governments each run their own version of it, so any page written for the whole country either invents a national answer or hands you off to the office that has the real one. This page hands you off, and sets out the machinery first so that the office’s answer makes sense when you get it.

What is a work permit, and what is it for?

Depending on where you live it is called a work permit, an employment certificate, working papers, or a certificate of age. The names vary; the function does not. The document records that a specific minor is a specific age, and in most states that a specific employer intends to give them specific work, with a parent or guardian aware and agreeing.

It exists for two reasons pointing in two directions. It keeps a teenager out of work their age does not allow, and it protects an employer from an honest mistake about how old somebody is.

That second purpose is the one nobody explains, and it is why an employer sometimes wants paperwork even where the state does not demand it. Federal law does not require a permit. What it does is make an age certificate available as a good-faith defense: an employer who hires a minor in reliance on a certificate has something to point at if the age was wrong. Without it, the employer carries the risk alone. That is a real incentive, and it explains a lot of otherwise puzzling HR behaviour.

Is there a federal work permit?

No. This is the sentence most pages bury.

What federal law does is set the minimum ages, cap the daily and nightly hours a 14 or 15 year old may be scheduled, and draw up the hazardous occupations orders that apply to everyone under 18. It issues no certificates and demands none. The Department of Labor states plainly on its age certificate page that it “does not administer State laws.”

Every permit requirement in the United States is a state requirement. If a site offers to sell you a federal work permit, it is selling you something that does not exist.

The two layers interact by a rule worth memorising: whichever of them is stricter on a given question is the one that governs. DOL puts it as a state law that is less restrictive than the federal rule yields to the federal rule, and a state law that is more restrictive controls. So your state can require paperwork, and impose limits, that federal law never mentions.

Who issues them, and what varies between states?

The Department of Labor maintains a state-by-state table showing which body issues employment and age certificates and for which ages. Reading it, the differences are structural rather than cosmetic.

What varies	The range you will find
Whether a certificate exists at all	Compulsory for some or every minor across a large group of states, and simply not issued in a handful of others
Who hands it over	The high school in one large group of states, the labor department in another, and either one depending on circumstances in a few
The age it stops applying	For some states the requirement ends at 16; elsewhere it runs all the way to the eighteenth birthday
Whether it is tied to one job	In some states a new employer means a new certificate
Whether a doctor signs	Some states want a physical or a physician’s statement of fitness
When in the year it is issued	Some processes run through the school term and shift to the labor department in summer

DOL also states the limits of its own table, which is worth knowing before you rely on it: the table “includes both the general certification procedure required by law and those used in practice,” and it does not include exceptions to the general procedures, nor certificates that may be required for street trades, entertainment or other special-permit work.

Note the “as of” date at the top of that page as well. The version current at the time of writing is dated January 1, 2024, so treat it as a pointer and confirm anything that matters.

What does the paperwork usually ask for?

In states that require certificates, the pattern is fairly consistent even where the details are not. Expect most of this.

• Proof of age, usually a birth certificate, passport or driver's licence.
• Signatures from both the teenager and a parent or guardian.
• An employer-completed block covering the job title, the duties, the scheduled hours, the rate of pay and the address of the workplace.
• Confirmation of school enrollment, in some states.
• A physician's statement of fitness, in some states and for some kinds of work.

The employer block is what stalls things. A parent cannot fill it in, which means the certificate usually cannot be completed until there is a real offer with real details attached. Sequence matters here: the offer has to land first, the certificate is built on it, and only then does anybody schedule a shift.

What a permit does not do

A certificate is permission to be employed. It is not permission to work longer, and it is not permission to do restricted work.

The hour limits on 14 and 15 year olds apply in full with a permit in hand. So do the hazardous occupations orders, which bar anyone under 18 from a defined list of work regardless of paperwork, unless a specific written apprentice or student-learner exemption applies to that specific order. If an employer implies the permit settles the question of what your teenager can do, that is the moment to go and read can a 17 year old work on a roof or what power tools a 16 year old can legally use, depending on the job.

Getting a straight answer for your own state

Work down this list and stop as soon as one of them settles it.

1. Open the Department of Labor’s employment and age certificate table and read your state’s row.
2. Cross-check hours and night work in the selected state child labor standards table, which is current as of July 15, 2025 at the time of writing.
3. Where either one leaves you guessing, pull the number for your state from DOL’s state labor offices list and ring it. Every state, DC and the territories are on there, and one call beats an afternoon with a statute.
4. Ring the high school office. Where schools issue certificates they do it constantly, and they will hand you the current form across the counter.
5. Ask HR, if the employer is large enough to hire minors every summer and have a written process.

If two sources disagree, believe your state labor department over everyone else, this page included.

What this looks like for one family

Priya is 16 and gets an afternoon offer from a florist’s shop in early May. Her father does two things with it, and the second is the one almost nobody does.

The first is the process. He finds his state’s row in the DOL certificate table, sees that the school district issues certificates for minors under 18, and rings the high school office. They tell him to bring proof of age plus the employer’s completed block. The manager fills in the duties and hours on a Tuesday, both go in on Wednesday, and the certificate is back before the week is out. Had he left it until late June the office would have been shut, his state’s summer process runs through the labor department instead, and the start date would have moved.

The second is that he actually reads the duties the manager wrote down: watering, potting and till work. He checks that list against the hazardous occupations orders and finds nothing on it. That check takes a minute, the form makes it easy, and it is the step that would have caught a problem if the manager had written “deliveries” or “assist in the workshop” instead.

This is illustrative rather than a real family, but the timing trap and the duties check are both real.

Where this can get serious

If a certificate is refused, if an employer asks a teenager to start before the paperwork is done, or if the duties on the form do not match the work actually being assigned, that is not a paperwork quibble. It is the point at which to call your state labor department, and if there is real money or a real injury involved, a lawyer. Nothing here is legal advice, and states rewrite these rules through ordinary legislation without warning anybody.

Once the permit question is settled, the broader picture is in child labor laws explained for parents, and if the job itself starts to worry you, what your teen can do if a job feels unsafe covers the next step.