Fifteen-year-olds still clock out at 7 p.m. in December

Every November I watch the same hire happen. The private-dining calendar fills up, the catering book doubles, and someone's nephew, a 15-year-old high school sophomore, gets brought on to bus the holiday parties. The first schedule puts him on a Tuesday party from 6 to 10 p.m. That one shift breaks two federal rules before he clears a plate.

The holiday calendar is where restaurants trip on the rules for workers under 18, because the summer limits people remember don't apply in December. This is the federal rule as published, not legal advice, and your state may be stricter.

The 7 p.m. line holds until June

For 14- and 15-year-olds, the hours rule is 29 CFR 570.35. They work only outside school hours, and the caps depend on whether school is in session:

The 9 p.m. limit applies only from June 1 through Labor Day. The rest of the year the last minute of work is 7 p.m., including weekends, holidays and every night of winter break. The daily cap on a school day is "not more than 3 hours in any 1 day when school is in session, including Fridays." A Friday-night party gets no exception.

So the 6-to-10 busser shift fails twice: it runs three hours past 7 p.m., and on a school night it's four hours against a three-hour cap. A 15-year-old can set the room from 4 to 7 p.m. Someone 16 or older works the dinner.

Winter break opens 40-hour weeks only in a full workweek off

This is the trap I see most. The regulation treats any week in which the local public school district is in session, even for one day or part of a day, as a week when school is in session. The week is your fixed 168-hour workweek, not the calendar week.

Take a district whose last day before break is Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2026, and a restaurant with a Sunday-to-Saturday workweek:

• Week of Dec. 20 to 26: school is in session Monday through Wednesday, so the whole week is capped at 18 hours. Thursday through Saturday are days with no school, so each can run to 8 hours, but the week still can't pass 18.
• Week of Dec. 27 to Jan. 2: no school days, so 40 hours and 8 a day are allowed, still between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. New Year's Eve service ends at 7 for anyone under 16.
• First week of January: if school resumes Monday, Jan. 4, that week drops back to 18 hours, with 3 a day on school days.

Two details change the math. The district that counts is the one where the minor lives, not where your restaurant is, so a teen from the next town over can be on a different calendar. And homeschooled or private-school students are measured against that public district's schedule, not their own school's break dates.

What a 15-year-old can and can't touch on the line

Under-16s can cook, but only within narrow limits set in 29 CFR 570.34:

• Grills only if electric or gas with no open flame. Rotisseries, broilers and pressurized fryers are out.
• Deep fryers only if the fryer has a device that automatically lowers the baskets into the oil and automatically raises them out. A basket a teenager drops by hand is a violation.
• Cleaning equipment, filtering grease or moving a container of hot oil is allowed only when everything is at or below 100 °F. Filtering the fryer right after close fails that test.
• Freezers only for occasional, momentary entry to grab something. Work in meat coolers is off-limits.

Section 570.33 prohibits outright all baking, any cooking beyond the grills and fryers above, power-driven slicers, choppers, processors and mixers, and ladders. In December that rules out a 15-year-old baking holiday cookies, running the stand mixer or climbing the stepladder to hang garlands in the dining room.

Sixteen and seventeen: no hour caps, same hazard list

Federal law sets no hours limit at 16 or 17 in any job not declared hazardous. The hazardous orders that hit restaurants:

HO 10 applies "regardless of the product being processed by these machines," so a slicer used only for cheese still counts. The first-hires post covers the cleaning trap in more detail.

Driving matters more in catering season than any other time. Nobody under 17 drives for the job at all. A 17-year-old may drive only if all nine conditions in the rule are met, among them daylight only, a vehicle of 6,000 pounds or less, within 30 miles, no more than two delivery trips a day, a clean driving record and driver's ed, and driving that takes no more than a third of any workday. The bigger catch is that 29 CFR 570.52 bans "urgent, time-sensitive deliveries" outright, and names "the delivery of pizzas and prepared foods to the customer" as an example. A hot catering drop-off to an office party is exactly that. Your 17-year-old can ride along to set up. He can't be the driver.

Fines are frozen at 2025 levels. Enforcement isn't.

Penalties normally rise with inflation each January. Not this year. On May 27, 2026 the Labor Department published a Federal Register notice explaining that the October 2025 consumer price data was never published because of the funding lapse, so "the 2026 adjustment is cancelled entirely." The 2025 amounts carry over:

• $16,035 for each minor who was the subject of a violation
• $72,876 when the violation causes a minor's serious injury or death
• $145,752 when that injury or death case is also willful or repeated

Some pages still quote $10,000 or $11,000. Those are older base amounts from the statute's text, before the inflation adjustments that apply today. The department says it will review its penalty amounts in 2027.

The cap is per minor, and the counts add up. The department's own enforcement data shows child labor penalties went from $15,164,150 in fiscal 2024 to $37,215,327 in fiscal 2025, across 976 cases and 5,272 minors. Of those minors, 773 were in hazardous occupations. The restaurant cases, as DOL reported them, read like a list of the rules above:

• Captain D's franchisee, Tennessee (August 2026): minors lowered food into fryers by hand, one was burned by hot grease, and minors ran a batter mixer. Penalty: $62,235, plus a compliance agreement across all seven locations.
• Mt. Fuji Hibachi, Colorado (February 2026): a 17-year-old loaded a trash compactor, and fourteen 14- and 15-year-olds worked past legal hours. Penalty: $22,249.
• Marco's Pizza franchisee, Tennessee (November 2024): minors cleaned dough sheeters, and 11 workers aged 14 and 15 worked past 7 p.m. outside summer. Penalty: $207,486.

Fourteen minors at the $16,035 ceiling would be $224,490 for Mt. Fuji's hours violations alone. DOL assessed far less than that for all its findings there, and I couldn't read the full release to see why. Don't treat any of these figures as the price of a violation.

The stricter law wins in both directions

Where state and federal law both apply, the federal fact sheet says "the law with the stricter standard must be obeyed." That cuts two ways.

A looser state law doesn't help you. Iowa's 2023 law, for example, was reported to let 14- and 15-year-olds work until 9 p.m. during the school year, and the Labor Department's Solicitor reportedly said parts of it conflicted with federal law. A restaurant covered by federal law still sends its 15-year-olds home at 7.

A stricter state law adds to the federal floor. Federal law requires no work permit, but many states do. The department's meal-period page names 35 jurisdictions with separate meal-break rules for minors, though it's dated January 2023. Florida's statute, as of its 2025 edition, requires a 30-minute break after four continuous hours for workers 15 and under, and caps 16- and 17-year-olds at 30 hours a week while school is in session, with a waiver available. The Economic Policy Institute reported more states loosening their rules in 2026.

The Labor Department's regulatory agenda lists a deregulatory rule on hours for 14- and 15-year-olds, with a proposal targeted for September 2026. I found none published as of this writing, so the current limits govern this holiday season.

What I'm not going to give you

The share of child labor cases that are restaurants. DOL's data page doesn't split by industry, and I won't estimate it.

A 2026 state-by-state table. The state changes this year are reported in pieces, and the most complete sources I found weren't ones I could check line by line. Check your own state's labor department.

A typical penalty per violation. The three restaurant cases above range from $22,249 to $207,486, and I couldn't read the full releases to see how DOL got to each figure.

What to do

1. Put every minor's birthdate in your scheduling system and flag under-16 shifts outside 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., school days over 3 hours, and weeks over 18 hours (40 in a week with no school day).
2. Get the school calendar of each teen's home district, not just your own, and mark which workweeks have no school days at all.
3. Staff evening holiday parties with 16-and-up and give younger hires the 4-to-7 setup window in your own dining room. Under-16s can't load or unload the catering van or ride along to help deliver (29 CFR 570.33(f)); their own hand tools are the only exception.
4. Check your fryer. If the baskets don't lower and raise on their own, under-16s stay off it, and nobody under 16 filters hot oil.
5. Take minors off the driver list for catering deliveries, including 17-year-olds on hot drop-offs.
6. Train it on day one. The onboarding post covers how, and the list of machines a teenager can't touch belongs in it. In a fair-workweek city, the scheduling post covers the notice rules for fixing a posted schedule.

Disclosure: I work at Katalyst, which sells restaurant POS and catering software. No system knows which machines your teenagers are standing next to. The manager writing the December schedule does, and that's where these violations start or stop.