Under the infancy doctrine, contracts signed by minors are voidable at the minor’s option: the person under the age of majority can walk away from the deal, while the adult on the other side remains fully bound. The rule exists because the law treats people under 18 (or 19 or 21, depending on the state) as lacking the experience to weigh the consequences of binding agreements. The practical result is a lopsided arrangement by design, with virtually all contractual risk sitting on the adult who chose to do business with a minor.
Voidable Is Not the Same as Void
A minor’s contract is voidable, not void. The difference matters. A void contract never existed in the eyes of the law and cannot be enforced by anyone. A voidable contract is perfectly valid and enforceable unless the minor decides to challenge it.1Legal Information Institute. Infancy Think of it as a one-way option. The minor can hold the adult to the terms, or the minor can cancel the whole thing and demand their money back. The adult has no equivalent escape.
So a 16-year-old who buys a car and drives it for six months hasn’t done anything improper. The contract was real the whole time. It only becomes unenforceable if and when the minor affirmatively decides to undo it.
How a Minor Cancels the Contract
Canceling is called disaffirmance, and only the minor can do it. The power lasts throughout the entire period of minority and for a reasonable time after reaching the age of majority. No magic words are required. A minor can disaffirm by saying so directly, by sending a letter or message, or simply by acting in a way that makes the intent clear. Returning a purchased item to the seller’s doorstep communicates the message without a word.
The adult has no breach-of-contract claim when a minor exercises this right. That’s the trade the law makes: choose to contract with someone who lacks full legal capacity, and you accept the possibility that the deal evaporates. Courts are not particularly sympathetic to adults who complain about the outcome.
What Has to Be Returned
Disaffirming doesn’t just erase future obligations. It also raises the question of what happens to money and property that already changed hands, and the answer depends on your state.
The Majority Rule: Return What’s Left
In most states, a minor who disaffirms only needs to return whatever remains of the property in its current condition. If a teenager bought a laptop for $1,500, used it heavily for a year, and cracked the screen, they can hand back the damaged laptop and recover the full $1,500.2UC Law SF Scholarship Repository. Restitution in Minors Contracts in California No obligation to compensate for use, wear, depreciation, or accidental damage. The loss falls on the adult who chose to sell to a minor.
The Benefit Rule
A minority of jurisdictions apply what’s sometimes called the Benefit Rule, which reduces the refund by the value the minor received or the depreciation that occurred while the property was in their possession. If the laptop depreciated by $600, the seller would owe $900 back.
Intentional Damage
Even under the generous majority rule, courts draw the line at deliberate destruction. In Halbman v. Lemke, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that while a minor who disaffirms a non-necessity contract bears no liability for ordinary use or depreciation, the protection does not extend to willful destruction of property.3Open Casebook. Halbman v Lemke Where a minor intentionally damages or destroys the goods, the seller can pursue a tort claim separate from the contract.
When a Minor Lies About Their Age
A 16-year-old claims to be 18 to buy a car or sign up for a service. Does the lie strip away the right to disaffirm? That depends on where you live.
Most states still let the minor disaffirm even after lying about their age. The reasoning: if the doctrine exists to protect minors from their own poor judgment, letting a lie override the protection would defeat the point. Three alternative approaches show up in the case law:
- A majority of courts allow the adult to sue the minor separately in tort for fraud or deceit. The claim rests on the lie, not on the contract.4Digital Commons @ DU. Rights of Adult Where Minor Misrepresents Age
- Some courts follow Myers v. Hurley Motor Company and require a minor who induced the contract through fraudulent age claims to account for the damage caused by the deception before recovering payments.4Digital Commons @ DU. Rights of Adult Where Minor Misrepresents Age
- A smaller number of states bar disaffirmance altogether when the minor actively lied about their age or conducted business as an adult.
One nuance applies across all three approaches. The fraud has to be active. Simply failing to volunteer an age when nobody asked is not enough. The minor has to have made an affirmative false statement.
Contracts a Minor Cannot Void
The doctrine has important limits. Some contracts bind minors just as fully as adults.
Necessaries
If minors could void every contract without consequence, no one would sell them food, rent them shelter, or provide medical treatment. The law carves out an exception for “necessaries,” the basic goods and services a person needs to survive. The traditional list is food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Courts have expanded the concept to include property and services that let a person earn a living or support dependents.
What counts as a necessary depends on the minor’s circumstances. A winter coat is a necessary for a teenager living on their own in Minnesota; a second designer jacket probably is not.
Even here, the law tilts toward the minor. Courts typically enforce necessaries under a quasi-contract theory rather than the agreement’s own terms, so the minor owes the reasonable market value of what they received, not necessarily the contract price.5Yale Law Journal. Quasi-Contractual Obligations A landlord who charged a 17-year-old above-market rent would be owed a fair rate, not the inflated one. And if a parent or guardian is already providing the item, a court may decide it was not really “necessary,” which pushes the contract back into ordinary voidable territory.
Insurance
Many states let minors above a certain age, often 15, enter binding contracts for life insurance, health insurance, and annuities. The usual limitation is that an unperformed promise to pay future premiums typically is not enforceable against a minor who hasn’t been emancipated.
Bank Accounts
No federal law prohibits minors from opening savings accounts, but because a deposit account is based on a state-law contract, a minor could theoretically disaffirm it.6Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Guidance to Encourage Financial Institutions Youth Savings Programs and Address Related Frequently Asked Questions Several states have statutes specifically making a minor’s savings account legally enforceable. In practice, many banks still require a parent or custodian as a co-owner.
Military Enlistment
Military enlistment contracts bind minors. The U.S. Supreme Court settled this in United States v. Williams. A 17-year-old who enlists with parental consent cannot later disaffirm the enlistment, and neither can the parents.
Court-Approved Entertainment Contracts
Several states allow courts to approve entertainment or artistic services contracts involving minors. Once a court reviews and approves the agreement, the minor generally cannot disaffirm it. These statutes grew out of the entertainment industry’s problem with child actors voiding lucrative contracts after the work was finished.
Ratification After Turning 18
The right to disaffirm does not last forever. Once a person reaches the age of majority, a window opens to either void the contract or accept it. Silence past a reasonable time counts as ratification, and the contract becomes permanently binding.
What counts as “reasonable” is fact-specific and varies by jurisdiction. Some courts have treated delays of a few weeks as ratification; others have allowed longer. There is no uniform national timeframe, so relying on a general rule of thumb without checking local law is risky.
Ratification can also happen actively. Continuing to make payments on a car loan after your birthday, keeping leased equipment without objection, or telling the other party you intend to honor the deal all count. Once a contract is ratified, the right to disaffirm is gone for good.
Emancipation Ends the Protection
Emancipation is a legal process that gives a minor the rights and obligations of an adult before the standard age of majority. Once emancipated, the former minor has full contractual capacity, and the infancy doctrine no longer applies.
Emancipation usually requires a court proceeding and evidence that the minor is financially self-sufficient, living independently, and no longer reliant on a parent or guardian. In some states, marriage or active military service triggers it automatically. An emancipated minor cannot later void an agreement by claiming youth as a defense.
Parents, Co-Signers, and Who Actually Pays
Parents do not automatically inherit their child’s contractual obligations. As a general rule, parents bear no liability for contracts their minor children enter independently. If a 15-year-old signs up for an expensive subscription service, the parents are not on the hook for the charges unless they were somehow involved.
Co-signing changes that completely. A co-signer assumes personal liability for the contract’s performance. If the minor later disaffirms, the co-signing parent stays fully bound. That is why businesses dealing with minors often insist on an adult co-signer: it neutralizes the risk of the minor walking away, because the co-signer cannot.
Parents can also become liable if they authorized or directed the minor to enter the contract, or if the contract was for necessaries the parent had a legal duty to provide. Without co-signing, authorization, or a necessaries obligation, the minor’s contract is the minor’s problem alone.
Online Agreements and In-App Purchases
The infancy doctrine predates clickwrap by centuries, but courts have been applying it to digital transactions with increasing frequency. When a minor agrees to an app’s terms of service or makes purchases inside an online game, those agreements are contracts, and they’re voidable for the same reasons any other minor’s contract is.
Digital contracts create a restitution problem. There is nothing physical to return. Courts have generally held that as long as the minor stops using the service or game, they can disaffirm and recover their payments.
One wrinkle catches companies off guard: arbitration clauses buried in terms of service. Because the entire terms-of-service agreement is a contract with a minor, the minor can disaffirm the arbitration clause along with everything else. Companies that assumed they were insulated from class actions have faced exactly those suits when the plaintiffs were minors who voided the arbitration provision.
The Age of Majority Varies by State
Most states set the age of majority at 18, but not all. Alabama and Nebraska set it at 19, and Mississippi sets it at 21.7Legal Information Institute. Age of Majority A 19-year-old in Alabama still has the right to disaffirm contracts that a 19-year-old in most other states could not. For anyone doing business across state lines or online, which state’s law governs matters a great deal. Guessing wrong means assuming a contract is binding when it may not be.