Team Management News: The Labor Department Moves to Loosen Teen Work Hour Rules

If your team includes high schoolers bussing tables, running a register, or stocking shelves after school, a rule change moving through Washington this month is worth watching. The U.S. Department of Labor has scheduled a proposal for September 2026 that would loosen federal limits on how many hours, and how late, 14 and 15 year olds can work. Nothing has changed yet, and current federal limits still apply today, but the direction is clear enough that any business built around a teen labor pool should understand what is coming rather than be surprised by it.

The Current Rules, and What's on the Table

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act as it stands right now, 14 and 15 year olds can only work outside school hours, and only between 7am and 7pm, with that evening cutoff pushed to 9pm between June 1 and Labor Day. They are capped at three hours on a school day, including Fridays, eight hours on a non-school day, eighteen hours total during a week when school is in session, and forty hours during a week when it is not. Those limits have been in place for decades and are the baseline every restaurant, retail store, or gym that hires teen workers plans shifts around.

The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division has now listed a proposed rule titled "Hours of Work Standards for Young Workers Under the Fair Labor Standards Act" on its regulatory agenda, with a notice of proposed rulemaking indicated for September 2026. The agency has classified it as a deregulatory action, and reporting on the plan indicates it would likely loosen how late 14 and 15 year olds can stay on the clock and how many hours per week they can put in. The actual proposed text has not been published yet, so the specific new limits are not public. If it moves forward as described, it would be one of the first major changes to these federal hour standards in decades.

A Trend That Started in the States

The federal proposal is following a path several states have already taken. Ohio passed a law allowing 14 and 15 year olds to work until 9pm on school nights, up from the standard 7pm cutoff. Iowa, Indiana, Washington, Florida, and West Virginia have each loosened their own teen labor hour rules in recent years as well, generally extending how late minors can work or how many hours they can log during the school week. For multi-state operators, this already means the rules for a 15 year old cashier in Ohio can look different from the rules for the same role in a state that has not touched its teen labor law, and the federal proposal would add another layer on top of a patchwork that already varies by state.

The Pushback

The proposal has drawn immediate criticism from child labor advocates. Reid Maki, director of child labor advocacy for the National Consumers League and coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition, has called similar efforts to roll back teen labor protections misguided, pointing to research showing that when teens work more than 20 hours a week during the school year, their grades drop and school completion rates fall. That research matters for employers too, not just as a policy argument. A crew of student workers stretched too thin on hours tends to show up in call-outs, slipping performance, and turnover once a school year gets demanding, regardless of what the legal maximum allows.

What Restaurant and Retail Managers Should Do Now

• Know your current state rule, not just the federal floor. Several states already allow more hours than the federal minimum, and some are stricter. If you operate in more than one state, keep a simple reference sheet of the teen labor rule for each location so a manager is never guessing at a shift change.
• Keep tracking hours by age precisely, regardless of what changes. Whatever the federal rule ends up allowing, you still need an accurate, per-employee record of hours worked by anyone under 16, since a loosened federal ceiling does not remove the requirement to track and prove compliance.
• Set your own cap below the legal maximum during the school year. Even where the law allows more, capping student employees well under 20 hours a week during the school year protects both their grades and your schedule reliability, and it is a policy you can set now without waiting for the rule to finalize.
• Watch for the actual proposed text before changing anything. A regulatory agenda listing is not a final rule. Once the notice of proposed rulemaking is published, there will be a public comment period before anything takes effect, so there is no need to adjust schedules based on this news alone.
• Flag which locations have the most exposure. If you run several sites, identify now which ones rely heavily on workers under 16, since those are the locations that will need the closest attention whenever a final rule, state or federal, actually changes the numbers.

How MyTeamTasks Helps

Tracking exactly who worked which hours, at which location, matters even more when age-based labor rules are shifting under multiple states and a possible federal change at once. MyTeamTask's task assignment and real-time monitoring give managers a clear, per-location record of shifts and completed work, so proving compliance for your under-16 employees does not depend on someone's memory of the schedule. For operators running multiple locations, that same visibility makes it easy to see which sites employ the most student workers and keep an eye on their hours as the rules keep moving.