A sixteen-year-old who wants a Saturday shift at a supermarket in Batavia and one who wants a counter job in Poughkeepsie start in the same room, which is the guidance office. New York requires an employment certificate before a minor works anywhere in the state, and the district issues it on paper, in a color set by the applicant's age. Green goes to students who are sixteen and seventeen and still enrolled.

New York working papers will move online in 2027. Under amendments Governor Kathy Hochul signed on May 9, 2025, as part of the state budget, New York will launch an online portal and statewide electronic database on May 9, 2027. The physical fitness certificate requirement will end, eliminating the trip parents currently make to a school district office. Students applying for working papers this fall should therefore expect to use the existing process; they will be the final cohort to do so.

The rules governing when and where minors may work will not change. Those requirements, set out in Article 4 of the Labor Law and Article 65 of the Education Law, determine how late a 17-year-old may work on a Tuesday, how many hours a 15-year-old may work each week, and which jobs remain off-limits to anyone under 18. Students and employers should review those limits before scheduling shifts, even after the new electronic system takes effect.

Which Certificate You Need

The Education Law names five certificate types, and three of them cover nearly every student. Section 3216 gives fourteen and fifteen-year-olds attending day school a student non-factory certificate, which the Department of Labor calls form AT-18 and everyone else calls blue papers. It is valid for work "in a trade, business or service" and never inside a factory. Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds still in school receive a student general employment certificate, form AT-19, the green papers, which the statute makes valid "for work in or in connection with a factory or any other trade, business or service."

Students who have left school, or are leaving for full-time work, receive a full-time employment certificate, form AT-20, printed on salmon stock. Separate permits cover farm work at twelve and thirteen and again at fourteen and fifteen, street trades, and newspaper carriers from age eleven. Whichever one a student receives expires two years from the date of issuance.

How to Get One This Fall

The State Education Department is direct about who does the issuing, stating that school districts are responsible for issuing employment certificates and permits to qualified applicants. A student may apply in the district where they live, the district where they attend school, or the district where the job sits, which matters to anyone crossing a county line for work.

Three things travel with the application. The first is proof of age, and Section 3218 ranks the acceptable documents in order, beginning with a certified transcript of a birth certificate or a baptismal record showing the date of birth, then a passport, then other documentary evidence in existence two years or more and satisfactory to the certificating officer. An affidavit of age is specifically excluded. The Labor Department also accepts a state photo ID or a driver's license.

The second is a parent or guardian signature on the application. For a full-time employment certificate the statute goes further, requiring that a parent or guardian personally appear before the issuing officer unless the applicant has already graduated from high school.

The third is the physical. Section 3220 requires a thorough physical examination performed within twelve months of the application, by the school health director or any physician licensed in New York. The useful detail for a student already on a roster is that a school sports physical counts when it falls inside that window, and it is the same paperwork the state reworked when it changed its athletic medical clearance rules.

What the Hours Rules Actually Say

For fourteen and fifteen-year-olds, the ceiling during the school year is three hours on a school day and eighteen hours a week, rising to eight hours a day and forty a week when school is out, across no more than six days either way. Nobody in that age group may work before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m., with one seasonal exception that pushes the evening limit to 9 p.m. between June 21 and Labor Day. A student enrolled in a work-study program approved by the commissioner may work up to twenty-three hours a week instead of eighteen.

Sixteen and seventeen-year-olds get more room and a harder rule to remember. On a day preceding a school day the limit is four hours, or six for students in a cooperative work-experience program, while Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays allow eight. The weekly ceiling is twenty-eight hours during the school year and forty-eight when school is out. The clock runs from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on a night before school, and to midnight when there is no school the next morning.

The exception buried in that last sentence is the provision employers break most often. A sixteen or seventeen-year-old may work until midnight on a night before a school day, but only with written permission from a parent or guardian and a certificate of satisfactory academic standing from the school. Both are required, not either one. Newspaper carriers, farm laborers, child performers and models, bridge caddies, babysitters and seventeen-year-old summer camp counselors sit outside these limits entirely.

Meal breaks come from a different section and reach everyone. A shift longer than six hours that covers the window between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. carries at least a thirty-minute meal period in a store or office and sixty minutes in a factory. A shift longer than six hours beginning between 1 p.m. and 6 a.m. carries forty-five minutes, taken near the midpoint.

The Jobs That Stay Closed

Anyone under sixteen is barred from factory work other than delivery and clerical employment in an enclosed office, from operating or helping to operate unguarded machinery, from painting or exterior cleaning connected to building maintenance, and from any slicing, grinding, pressing or mixing machine. Peddling appears on the list, and so does the catch-all covering any practice, exhibition or place dangerous or injurious to life.

For everyone under eighteen the federal hazardous orders and the state list overlap heavily, closing off construction and roofing, demolition and wrecking, mining and quarrying, slaughtering and meat packing, power-driven woodworking, metal-forming and bakery machinery, circular saws and guillotine shears, explosives, motor vehicle driving and outside helper work, and custodial roles inside correctional institutions. Seven of the seventeen federal orders admit registered apprentices and student-learners aged sixteen and seventeen under specific conditions, which is the doorway career and technical education programs use.

What the Paycheck Should Say

The minimum wage as of January 1, 2026 is $17.00 an hour in New York City, Long Island and Westchester and $16.00 across the rest of the state, and tipped food service workers must receive at least $11.35 in cash downstate and $10.70 upstate before the tip credit applies. Beginning in 2027 the wage moves with a three-year average of the Consumer Price Index for the Northeast.

The state also publishes a Youth Workers Bill of Rights, unveiled in May 2024, which sets out ten entitlements in language written for a teenager rather than a lawyer, among them a paystub every pay period, a thirty-minute break on any shift of six hours or more, the right to keep tips, and the right to refuse dangerous work. Commissioner Betty A. Rosa put the reasoning plainly when the document was released.

"The Youth Worker Bill of Rights gives young New Yorkers vital information about their rights as employees. Knowledge is power; so, knowing your rights and how to enforce them will benefit working students throughout the State."

What Changes on May 9, 2027

The rebuild is written into Labor Law Section 135, which directs the Department of Labor to create and maintain a database for the employment of minors in consultation with the Education Department. Employers hiring anyone under eighteen will register the business name, contact email, work locations and the names and number of minor employees, then file a certified statement that those minors work only in positions the law permits. Certificates will have to be available at the worksite for inspectors, and electronic access satisfies that.

Students register too, and will have to update the certificate when they accept a job offer for it to remain valid. School officials gain a lever they do not have now, because the amendments let them request revocation of a certificate based on academic performance, attendance, willingness to participate in structured educational programs and other relevant factors.

Two requirements disappear. The physical fitness certification comes out of the list of documents a student must submit, and Section 3220 is repealed outright. The provision allowing eleven-year-olds to carry newspapers is repealed on the same date, which means it remains lawful today and permits for carriers aged eleven to eighteen are still being issued this fall. Allan Bloom, an employment lawyer at Proskauer Rose, gave the Associated Press the epitaph.

"The need for a workforce of kids to go throwing newspapers on stoops is just a thing of the past"

Why Albany Rewrote Any of This

The Labor Department opened 464 child labor cases statewide in 2022, a 68 percent increase over the prior year, and collected more than $270,000 in civil penalties. A crackdown announced in June 2023 covered 145 business inspections and produced $105,000 in penalties against a single Staten Island Wendy's franchisee whose minor employees worked during school days, worked late on school nights and exceeded permitted hours.

A 2024 audit by the State Comptroller found the follow-through uneven, reporting that child labor investigations missed the department's three-month completion target in 56 of 87 cases, with 36 running past a year or still open, and that the agency had no mechanism for identifying hazardous child labor cases. The penalty schedule that took effect immediately in May 2025 raised the maximum first-violation civil penalty from $1,000 to $10,000, set second violations between $2,000 and $25,000, and put third and subsequent violations between $10,000 and $55,000. Where a violation causes serious injury or death, a third offense now reaches $175,000.

Commissioner Roberta Reardon has been describing the shift for three years.

"As we see a rise in child labor violations, we are acting quickly to ensure young people know their rights and are protected in the workplace. Violating labor laws is unacceptable, and it's particularly egregious when it involves vulnerable workers who are just entering the world of work."

More Students Are Asking

Teen employment has climbed for a second straight year. Pew Research Center found that 35.5 percent of sixteen to nineteen-year-olds worked at some point during summer 2026, up from 33.8 percent in 2025, which works out to roughly 6.2 million teenagers nationally. The rate among sixteen and seventeen-year-olds specifically is 24 percent against 48 percent for eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, and accommodation and food service accounts for 32 percent of employed teens.

The school-year picture is thinner. A September analysis published by The 74, drawing on the American Enterprise Institute's American Teenagers Survey, put the share of teenagers holding a part-time job at 15 percent overall and 28 percent among sixteen and seventeen-year-olds, and found that only 17 percent said adults had discussed apprenticeships with them at length compared with 52 percent for college. New York's answer to part of that gap starts this year, since the financial literacy mandate covering budgeting, credit, debt and saving takes effect for grades five through twelve in 2026-27. A first paycheck is where most of that stops being theoretical, which is the same argument running underneath our guide to earning college credit in high school.

Students who believe an employer is breaking these rules can file a child labor complaint with the Department of Labor or call 888-525-2267, and filing does not require the school to be involved. The blue and green papers stay in circulation until May 8, 2027.