On July 1, 2026, Indiana employers who hire teenagers woke up to a strange kind of relief: a state compliance database they'd been logging into for years simply stopped existing. No sunset notice buried in an agency newsletter, no grace period, no migration to a new portal — the Indiana Department of Labor's Youth Employment System (YES) was decommissioned outright, and with it went a reporting requirement that had applied to every business with five or more working minors on payroll.
If you run a restaurant, grocery store, movie theater, amusement park, or retail shop in Indiana and you've hired anyone under 18 in the last few years, this change affects you directly. But — and this is the part that trips people up — "the registration requirement is gone" does not mean "the rules about hiring teenagers are gone." Indiana's underlying child labor protections are still fully in force. Only the state's tracking mechanism disappeared.
Here's what actually changed, what didn't, and what you should be doing differently (or, more likely, doing yourself since the state no longer will).
A Quick History: From Work Permits to YES to Nothing
To understand why this repeal matters, it helps to know the last decade of Indiana youth-employment paperwork:
- Before 2020: Like most states, Indiana required a physical work permit for each minor employee, typically issued by their school.
- 2020: Indiana eliminated individual work permits and replaced them with YES — a centralized online database where any employer with five or more minor employees had to register the business and self-report details about those workers.
- 2021–2025: YES became the state's primary tool for tracking teen employment. Employers who missed reporting deadlines faced monetary penalties.
- July 1, 2026: House Enrolled Act 1302 repeals the YES reporting requirement entirely. The database is gone. The late-reporting penalties are gone. There is currently no state-run registry of which businesses employ minors or how many.
That's four different compliance regimes in six years for the same underlying question — "who is allowed to hire a 15-year-old, and how many hours can they work?" If your business has any turnover in its teen workforce (and if you're in food service or retail, it almost certainly does), it's worth a five-minute internal audit to make sure nobody on your team is still trying to log into a portal that no longer exists, or worse, assuming that because reporting ended, the underlying labor law did too.
What HB 1302 Actually Removes
The bill's practical effect for employers is narrow but real:
- No more YES registration. Businesses employing five or more minors no longer need to create or maintain an account in the state system.
- No more self-reporting. You don't need to report the number, ages, or job duties of minor employees to the state.
- No more late-reporting penalties. The monetary fines tied specifically to missed or late YES filings have been eliminated along with the system itself.
- Unrelated housekeeping: HB 1302 also removed a "belt examiner certificate" requirement in the mining industry — a niche provision that has nothing to do with retail or restaurant hiring but shows up in the same bill text.
What HB 1302 Does Not Touch
This is the part employers most often get wrong, and it's the part that keeps advocacy groups like the Child Labor Coalition raising alarms. Reid Maki, the Coalition's director, has argued that eliminating the tracking system "compounds the mistake of ending the work permit system" and makes enforcement meaningfully harder — because inspectors lose a data source that told them where teen workers actually were, and the registration process itself likely discouraged some violations before they happened.
Whether or not you agree with that critique, the legal obligations it's worried about are still on the books:
- Hour restrictions for 14- and 15-year-olds remain unchanged. During the school year, they can work until 7:00 p.m. on school nights, up to 3 hours on a school day, and up to 18 hours in a school week. From June 1 through Labor Day, the evening cutoff extends to 9:00 p.m., and they can work up to 8 hours a day and 40 hours a week — as long as the next day isn't a school day once classes resume.
- 16- and 17-year-olds can work adult hours. Indiana removed most hour restrictions for older teens back in 2025, and that hasn't changed with HB 1302.
- Hazardous occupation restrictions still mirror federal law. Minors are still barred from the same categories of dangerous work — operating certain power equipment, roofing, most driving duties, and other jobs the U.S. Department of Labor classifies as hazardous orders — regardless of whether the state is tracking who employs them.
- Federal FLSA child labor rules apply regardless of state reporting. The U.S. Department of Labor doesn't care that Indiana shut down YES. Federal age certificates, hazardous occupation orders, and civil penalty exposure under the Fair Labor Standards Act are untouched by a state-level repeal.
- Escalating state penalties for actual violations still exist. A first violation of Indiana's youth employment rules draws a warning letter; a second draws a $50–$100 fine; a third, $75–$200; and a fourth or subsequent violation can run $100–$400 depending on severity. (A separate 2026 change under SB 80 does waive civil penalties for hour violations of 10 minutes or less — a minor grace note, not a broader rollback.)
In short: the paperwork addressed to the state went away. The paperwork you need for yourself did not.
Why This Actually Raises Your Compliance Burden
It sounds counterintuitive — one less form to file should mean less work — but removing a state registry shifts risk back onto the employer in a specific way. When YES existed, the state had its own record of your minor headcount, ages, and (implicitly) some paper trail if an inspector ever needed to check your numbers against what you'd self-reported. Now that record doesn't exist anywhere except inside your own business.
That means if the Indiana Department of Labor or the federal DOL ever opens an investigation — a workplace injury involving a minor, a wage complaint, a random audit — the only evidence of your compliance history is whatever you kept internally. There's no state system to point to as a secondary record. You are now the sole record-keeper for a category of employee the government cares a great deal about protecting.
For restaurants, grocery stores, and retailers — the industries most likely to have five-plus teen employees at any given time — that argues for treating internal recordkeeping as more important than it was before, not less.
What to Track Going Forward (Since the State Won't)
Even without a YES filing requirement, a well-run business hiring minors should still maintain, per employee:
- Proof of age (birth certificate, driver's license, or state ID copy) on file
- Job duties assigned, cross-checked against the federal hazardous occupation list
- Actual hours worked per day and per week, especially during the school year when the 14-15 age bracket has hard caps
- Start dates and any change in duties or hours
- Parental consent or acknowledgment, where your internal policy requires it, even though state law no longer mandates a specific form
None of this needs to live in a state portal. It needs to live in records you control and can produce quickly if asked. That's a bookkeeping problem as much as an HR problem — payroll data (hours, pay rate, job classification) already flows through your accounting system, so the cleanest way to stay audit-ready is to make sure your books tag minor employees distinctly enough that you can pull an hours-worked report for any of them on demand, without digging through timesheets by hand.
The Bookkeeping Angle Most Employers Miss
Youth employment compliance and financial recordkeeping aren't separate problems — they're the same data, viewed from two angles. The hours a 15-year-old cashier worked last Tuesday matter to Indiana's labor rules and to your payroll expense ledger. If your books and your HR compliance records live in two disconnected systems (a spreadsheet for one, software you don't fully control for the other), you're doing the reconciliation work twice and increasing the odds that something falls through the cracks the next time a state law changes shape again — which, given Indiana's four regimes in six years, it will.
Plain-text accounting keeps that data in one auditable, version-controlled place. Every payroll entry, every wage adjustment, every hour logged for a minor employee becomes a line in a ledger you can query, filter, and hand to an accountant — or an inspector — without translation. When the rules change again (and in youth employment law, they always do), you're not scrambling to reconstruct history from three different tools; you're just running a new report against records you already trust.
Simplify Your Financial Management
As Indiana's youth employment rules keep shifting shape, don't let payroll recordkeeping become the thing that quietly falls out of compliance. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — every payroll entry auditable, every record version-controlled, no black boxes. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.