Child Influencer Labor Laws: State Rules, Trust Accounts, Taxes

Child influencer labor laws vary sharply by state, and most of the country has none at all. As of mid-2025, only Illinois, Minnesota, California, Utah, Arkansas, and Montana have enacted legislation specifically protecting children who appear in monetized online content. Federal law does not fill the gap. A child featured in a family YouTube channel or TikTok account in any other state has no guaranteed right to their earnings, no required trust account, and no statutory way to force removal of the content when they grow up.

Why Federal Law Does Not Protect Child Influencers

The Fair Labor Standards Act restricts child labor in most commercial settings but carves out two exemptions that swallow the child influencer situation whole. Children of any age can work for a business entirely owned by their parents, with narrow exceptions for mining, manufacturing, and hazardous occupations declared by the Secretary of Labor.¹ A parent running a family channel through their own LLC fits inside that carve-out. Actors and performers are separately exempt from federal child labor rules, and it remains unsettled whether a child appearing in monetized home videos even qualifies as a “performer” under that exemption.

Neither exemption was written with monetized social media in mind. The parental carve-out assumed children helping at a family store. The performer exemption assumed studio productions with contracts and union oversight. Because the FLSA does not treat social media content creation as a regulated form of employment for minors, no federal agency tracks how many hours a child spends filming, whether they are paid, or how their earnings are managed.

States That Have Passed Child Influencer Laws

Illinois was first, enacting Senate Bill 1782 in 2023 as the first state law in the country to require trust accounts and recordkeeping for minors featured in monetized online content.² Minnesota followed in 2024 with a broader statute that took effect July 1, 2025.³ California updated its longstanding child performer protections in 2024 through Senate Bill 764, extending trust account requirements to social media content creators.⁴ Utah, Arkansas, and Montana each enacted their own versions in 2025.

Everywhere else, a child featured in monetized content has no state-level financial protection, no trust account requirement, and no right to force content removal. The rules described below apply only where a state has enacted them.

Trust Account Requirements for Child Earnings

Each of the enacting states requires that a share of the revenue tied to a child’s appearances be set aside in a trust the parent cannot touch. The formulas differ.

Illinois calculates the deposit as a proportion of the child’s screen time. If a child appears in 100% of a video’s content, the parent must set aside at least 50% of the gross earnings from that content. If the child appears in 50% of the content, the trust gets at least 25%, and so on.²

California’s SB 764 uses a similar proportional approach but requires 65% of the child’s proportionate share of total gross earnings to be placed in trust.⁴

Minnesota goes further. Children under 14 are entitled to 100% of the profits generated by their appearances, and minors aged 14 to 18 who produce their own content are entitled to their profits as well.³

In every state that has enacted these laws, the trust funds are the property of the child, not the parent. The parent acts as a fiduciary and must manage the money in the child’s interest. The funds are locked away from parental use until the child turns 18.

When Do the Protections Actually Apply?

None of these laws cover every family that posts a video of a child. They apply only when a child’s presence in monetized content crosses a specific threshold. Illinois, California, and Minnesota use the same baseline: the protections apply when a child appears in at least 30% of a content creator’s compensated videos over a 30-day period.² The 30% is measured by the portion of each video in which the child appears or is the subject of narration, compared against the total length of the content.

Illinois adds a revenue trigger: the content must meet the platform’s threshold for generating compensation, or the creator must have received at least $0.10 per view.² A family posting occasional unmonetized videos is not covered even if the child appears in every frame. The target is a commercial operation built around a child’s participation.

Minnesota layers on an age rule. Children under 14 cannot be the featured subject of more than 30% of compensated content, and if they do appear beyond that threshold, the parent owes them 100% of the associated profits.³ The state treats excessive appearances by young children as a violation triggering full profit-sharing, not just a trust deposit.

Recordkeeping Parents Must Maintain

The documentation burden falls on the parent or creator. Illinois requires vloggers to log every instance a child appears in compensated content, the revenue each piece of content generates, and the dates and amounts of every trust deposit.² Minnesota requires records including the minor’s name, the compensation generated, and how much was deposited into the trust account for any minor appearing in at least 30% of compensated content.³

The logs create a paper trail the child can use later. A minor or their representative can request the documents to check compliance, and those records become the central evidence in any dispute over what was owed. Parents who fail to keep them will have a hard time defending a claim brought by an adult child years down the line.

The Right to Delete Childhood Content

Financial protections address only part of the problem. A child who grew up on camera may reach adulthood and want the record scrubbed. Utah became the first state to enact a right-to-delete law specifically for child influencers, signed by Governor Spencer Cox in March 2025.⁵

California has similar legislation pending. Senate Bill 1247 would require parents to delete or edit content so the child is no longer featured within 10 business days of receiving a removal request from the child after they turn 18. The bill applies to parents whose compensated content featured the child in at least 30% of their videos and would authorize the former child influencer to sue a parent who refuses. As of mid-2025, SB 1247 was still moving through committee. Ohio has proposed similar legislation, but that bill was still awaiting a committee assignment as of late 2025.⁶

The right to delete is distinct from COPPA, the federal rule that protects children under 13 from having personal information collected by website operators without parental consent.⁷ COPPA governs children using websites. Right-to-delete laws address an adult undoing decisions a parent made on their behalf.

How the Rules Get Enforced

Every one of the newer state laws includes something traditional child labor law lacked: a private right of action. Under Illinois law, if a vlogger fails to deposit the required earnings into a trust, the minor can sue for actual damages, punitive damages, and litigation costs. Minnesota similarly allows the minor, or an adult who was previously depicted as a minor, to sue for damages.³

The hard part is who the defendant is. A child influencer’s employer is usually their own parent. A minor living at home is unlikely to sue while still a dependent, so the practical enforcement window opens at 18, when the child gains access to the records and can act independently. That is why the recordkeeping mandates matter as much as the trust rules themselves. Without the logs, proving how much revenue a specific video earned and what share belonged to the child becomes nearly impossible.

In states without a child influencer statute, remedies are thin. A child could try to argue a general breach of fiduciary duty, but winning that claim without a purpose-built statute is much harder, and precedent is limited.

Tax Obligations That Apply Everywhere

Whether or not a state requires trust accounts, the IRS treats a child’s content creation income as taxable earned income, and the self-employment rules apply regardless of the earner’s age. Any minor with net self-employment earnings of $400 or more in a tax year must file a return and pay self-employment tax at a combined rate of 15.3%, covering both the Social Security and Medicare portions an employer would normally split with a W-2 worker.⁸ For 2026, the Social Security portion applies to the first $184,500 of combined earnings.⁹

A common misconception is that a child influencer’s income is “unearned” and subject to the Kiddie Tax, which taxes a child’s investment income at the parent’s rate. In most cases that is wrong. When a child’s business income comes from personal services rather than invested capital, the IRS treats all of it as earned income.¹⁰ A child who appears on camera and generates revenue through that appearance is providing a personal service. The Kiddie Tax would apply only to sources like dividends or interest on the child’s savings.

The legal responsibility to file sits with the child, though the practical work sits with the parent. A six-year-old is not filing a Schedule SE. Families earning significant revenue from child-featured content should treat estimated quarterly tax payments as part of the cost of running the channel. The $400 filing threshold is low, and many family channels cross it within weeks of monetization.

What Even the Strongest State Laws Do Not Cover

Significant gaps remain everywhere. No state law currently caps the total hours a child can spend filming content in a day or week the way traditional child labor rules cap working hours in other industries. The content threshold tests measure what percentage of published output features the child, not how many takes or how many hours of setup went into producing it. A parent could film a child for six hours to produce a three-minute video without violating any time limit.

The laws also do not address the psychological side of growing up as a public figure. Content removal helps after the fact, but nothing in the current statutory framework requires a parent to assess whether the child wants to participate, whether the content is age-appropriate, or whether the child is showing signs of distress. Traditional child performer regulations in film and television include requirements like on-set welfare workers and daily work-hour limits that have no equivalent in the home-filming context.

For families in the more than 40 states without specific child influencer legislation, the only applicable federal protection comes from COPPA’s restrictions on collecting personal information from children under 13, which was designed for a different problem entirely.⁷ Until more states act or Congress steps in, the protections available to any given child influencer depend almost entirely on where they live.

1
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 43 Child Labor Provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act for Nonagricultural Occupations
2
Illinois General Assembly. Illinois Code SB1782 103rd General Assembly
3
Minnesota House of Representatives. Law Adds Protections for Minors Appearing in Online Media
4
California State Senate. California Governor Signs Senator Padilla Bill Updating Financial Protections for Youth Content Creators
5
California State Senate. Author of Social Media Child Performer Protections Introduces the Right to Delete Legislation Furthering Online Privacy Guardrails
6
Ohio House of Representatives. Reps McNally Grim Announce Two New Bills to Protect Child Actors Child Influencers
7
eCFR. 16 CFR Part 312 Childrens Online Privacy Protection Rule
8
Internal Revenue Service. Self-Employment Tax Social Security and Medicare Taxes
9
Social Security Administration. Contribution and Benefit Base
10
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 8615 Tax for Certain Children Who Have Unearned Income