How many hours can a 17-year-old work in California?

Unlike federal law, California child labor law limits how many hours a 17-year-old can work. In California, minors aged 17 can work up to:

• 48 hours per workweek,
• 8 hours per workday, if it is not a schoolday or if it is a day before a non-schoolday, and
• 4 hours per day on schooldays.

These hours that a 17-year-old works must be limited to the time between:

• 5am and 12:30am, if the next day is a non-schoolday, or
• 5am and 10pm.

These limitations ensure that 17-year-olds do not perform night work and can still attend school. Regularly-employed 17-year-olds who are not high school graduates must go to continuation school for at least four hours per week. If they are not regularly employed, 17-year-olds must go to continuation school for no less than 15 hours per week.¹

What jobs are off-limits to 17-year-olds?

In California, the following types of hazardous occupations cannot be performed by minors under 18:

• railroad work,
• work on a boat,
• driving a car or a truck,
• work on a scaffold,
• work that requires you to be in a tunnel, mine, excavation, or a quarry,
• any job that uses or makes dangerous acids or dyes,
• jobs that produce a lot of dust, or
• any type of job that is unhealthy or dangerous.²

Some other jobs can only be done with adult supervision. One example is handling alcoholic beverages at a package store.³

Note that federal law prohibits minors anywhere in the U.S. from working in certain industries and in certain hazardous jobs. These include

• using bakery machines,
• using saws or sawmills,
• using power-driven hoisting machines, like cranes,
• excavation work,
• meatpacking or other jobs slaughtering animals,
• roofing work, and
• logging.⁴

Do 17-year-olds need work permits?

Generally 17-year-olds need a work permit before they can get a job in California. They can request an application from their school or the State of California Department of Education (CDE) website.

Unless the 17-year-old is emancipated, the application must be signed by their parent or guardian. These permits expire five days after the start of the next school year.

Work permits can be revoked if:

• the job is hurting the minor’s health or education, or
• the conditions of the work permit are not being abided by.⁵

Additional reading

For more in-depth information, refer to these scholarly articles:

• Role of work permits in teen workers’ experiences – American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
• The relationship between work permits, injury, and safety training among working teenagers – American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
• Effects of Work Permits on Illegal Employment Among Youth Workers: Findings of a School-Based Survey on Child Labor Violations – American Journal of Public Health.
• Characteristics of teens with and without work permits – American Journal of Industrial Medicine.
• The vanishing teenage worker in the United States – Young people’s development and the Great Recession: Uncertain times and precarious futures.