The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and that number has not moved since July 2009. What almost nobody teaches a first time worker is that the law contains a lower number underneath it. Section 6(g) of the Fair Labor Standards Act allows an employer to pay a worker under the age of 20 a training wage of $4.25 an hour. It applies for the first 90 consecutive calendar days of employment with that employer. It is not a loophole and it is not rare. It has been written into federal law since 1996.
The details decide whether it applies to you. The 90 days are calendar days, not working days, so the clock runs whether or not you are scheduled. It counts from your first day with that specific employer, and it does not reset if you change positions inside the same company. The day you turn 20, the rate ends immediately, even if the 90 days are not finished. If you leave and come back to the same employer later, the earlier days already used are gone and cannot be charged against you twice. Write down your start date. It is the number that ends the rate.
The rule has a guardrail that gets ignored more than it gets enforced. An employer cannot displace an existing worker in order to hire someone at the training wage. That includes cutting an adult worker's hours, cutting their overtime, or laying them off to open a slot. Doing it is a violation of the Act, and the penalty falls on the employer rather than the teenager. In practice a schedule can be trimmed quietly and the connection is hard to prove. That is why the strongest protection is a written record of your own hours from week one.
State law often makes the whole thing moot, and this is the part worth checking first. When federal and state wage law disagree, the worker gets the higher rate. More than thirty states now set a minimum above $7.25, and many of them do not allow a youth training rate at all or set it much closer to the full wage. Tennessee has no state minimum wage law, so the federal floor governs there, which means the training wage is live. Two workers doing the same job on opposite sides of a state line can legally earn very different money for their first three months. Look up your own state before you sign. City rules can raise it further.
Related rules travel with this one. There is a separate tip credit that lets employers pay a cash wage as low as $2.13 an hour if tips bring the total to at least the full minimum, and the employer has to cover the gap when they do not. There is also a student learner certificate that permits a reduced rate for certain vocational programs, and a full time student program used by some retailers and universities. Each of these has different paperwork and different limits. They are not interchangeable, and an employer that mixes them up is usually out of compliance. Ask which one applies to you. Get the answer in writing.
Hours are regulated more tightly than pay for the youngest workers. Fourteen and fifteen year olds cannot work during school hours, are capped at 3 hours on a school day and 18 hours in a school week, and cannot work past 7 p.m. during the school year. Those caps rise to 8 and 40 when school is out, and the evening limit extends to 9 p.m. in summer. Sixteen and seventeen year olds have no federal hour limits but are barred from jobs the Department of Labor lists as hazardous. That list includes most power driven machinery, roofing and driving as a main duty.
What this adds up to is a first paycheck that deserves a real read. Check the hourly rate on the pay stub against what you were told at hiring. Check whether your state has its own minimum and whether it permits a youth rate. Count the days since your start date and mark day 91 on a calendar, because the raise to full minimum is automatic and employers do miss it. Keep your own log of hours worked, since a written record beats a memory in any dispute. A note on your phone is enough.
If the numbers do not line up, the path is straightforward. The Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor takes complaints, the service is free, and it does not require a lawyer. Back wages are recoverable and retaliation for filing is itself illegal. None of this makes a $4.25 rate feel fair, and reasonable people argue hard about whether the training wage should exist at all. Knowing it exists is what keeps it from being used on you longer than the law allows. Read the stub every week.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Fair Labor Standards Act.
