138 million children are in child labor. What does this actually mean?
According to a UN report published last year, there are 138 million children in child labor. In this article, we look at what this estimate exactly captures.
138 million children in the world are in child labor: that was the headline estimate in a report from the United Nations last year. To put this in perspective, that’s enough children to fill around 2 million school buses.
In the Sustainable Development Goals, the world had signed on to the target of “ending child labor in all its forms by 2025”. Clearly, we have missed this by a huge margin.
This situation is awful, and it deserves attention. But to make sense of the scale of the problem, and how to address it, we need to understand what this number actually captures. That starts with a seemingly simple question: what exactly counts as child labor? Governments have been debating that question for well over a century.
Harmful work: from principles to numbers
In its simplest definition, child labor is work that is done by a child and is likely to be harmful. This general principle was first codified in international legal conventions more than a century ago, and a series of them in the 20th century made its scope more precise, linking harms to work that endangers children’s “health, safety, or morals” or work that interferes with their schooling.1
In practice, though, these conventions were too general, and turning them into something measurable raised a whole set of questions. Some amount of light, non-hazardous work is probably harmless at some ages. A 15-year-old working a short weekend shift in a café is not the same as a 6-year-old doing the same work. Nor is working a few hours a week the same as working 12 hours a day. So, what thresholds should we use for age and hours of work in these cases?
In 2008, the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) agreed on answers to these measurement questions, adopting a resolution with specific rules based on three things: the child’s age, the hours they work, and the nature of the job.
The rules adopted by the UN for measurement, building on the ICLS resolution, are the following:
- Work in dangerous industries or occupations, or for 43 or more hours a week, always counts as child labor, regardless of age. This is called hazardous work.2
- For other, non-hazardous work, age decides. Below age 12, there is no allowance for light work: any economic activity, even a single hour a week, counts as child labor. Between ages 12 and 14, non-hazardous work counts once it reaches 14 hours a week. From age 15, non-hazardous work is not counted at all.
- Economic activity means employment or producing goods. Chores in a child’s own home, like cooking or childcare, are not counted, but working on a farm to produce food is.
The global picture
Applying these rules to household survey data gives the headline estimate: in 2024, 138 million children were in child labor. That’s about 8% of all children aged 5 to 17.
That’s what I show in this diagram, where I’ve also broken the figure into the corresponding conditions that apply in each case.
From the breakdown, we see that under the UN definitions, 54 million children are in hazardous work (which, under this framework, means work in dangerous industries or occupations, or very long hours). That’s 3% of all children globally.
In addition to this, 84 million children are in non-hazardous jobs that count as child labor, mainly because the children are too young to be doing them, or are doing them for too many hours. Here, the harm lies less in the work itself than in what it may displace: schooling and the time a child should have for rest and play.
A closer look
The estimates above include what most people intuitively associate with child labor: children in dangerous conditions, working long hours in factories or construction sites. This falls under the “hazardous work” category.
But as the diagram shows, this is only one part of the picture. Let’s consider some other types of work and how they fit into the definitions.
Agricultural work among young children
Close to half of all child labor under these definitions corresponds to non-hazardous work done by children under 12.
Much of this happens in agricultural settings, where any work done by children under 12 is counted as child labor, even if it is light and non-hazardous.
Imagine an 11-year-old helping on a family farm in sub-Saharan Africa. He feeds the animals every day, a couple of hours in the morning and again in the afternoon.
Work like this is extremely common. Around 6 in 10 children in child labor worldwide are working on farms or in other agricultural activities, most of it as part of family subsistence and on smallholder farms.3
As I mentioned above, the reason this type of work counts as child labor under the international conventions is that it’s considered to be harmful because of what it displaces: the children’s time for studying, resting, playing, and socializing.
Long hours
When we hear the term “hazardous work”, it’s natural to picture work that’s physically dangerous. That’s covered, but hazardous work also includes non-dangerous work that is included purely because of the number of hours. Remember, 43 hours or more per week of any kind of work counts as hazardous.
So, going back to the previous example of a child helping on a family farm: if this child’s work adds up to 43 hours or more across the week (around six hours a day for seven days a week), he is classified as being in hazardous work under the statistical definition, counted alongside children in physically dangerous occupations like construction and mining.
Chores at home
The measurement rules adopted by the UN exclude work related to chores in a child’s own home, like cooking or childcare. This is built into the definition: only an economic activity, meaning employment or the production of goods, counts as work for these purposes.
This is an important exclusion because a child could spend the same number of hours taking care of her siblings and cleaning at home as another child the same age spends feeding animals on a farm, and only the latter counts as child labor under these definitions.
This asymmetry affects the gender composition of the figures, as girls tend to do more of the household work that these definitions exclude.4
Forced labor
Some of the worst forms of child labor, such as trafficking and forced labor, are not counted in these estimates because they fall outside what household surveys can measure. This is a measurement limitation, rather than a conceptual exclusion. It’s a terrible problem over which we have limited visibility.5
Where this leaves us
The umbrella of “child labor” covers many different situations. It spans children working in exploitative and dangerous conditions, as well as children who are counted not because of the conditions they work in, but because they are too young to be working at all, even if that means helping on a family farm for only a few hours a day.
Once we see these differences, it becomes clear that child labor statistics capture a range of situations, and dealing with them calls for different kinds of responses.
This is worth keeping in mind when reading a target like the Sustainable Development Goal of ending child labor “in all its forms”. Those forms are very different, and much of what the numbers count is driven by conditions that have little to do with work itself.
As we saw, a large share of this work happens on family farms. Agricultural productivity, and its link to poverty, is worth emphasizing here because it is not usually thought of as a question about child labor, but it has large consequences for children. We have written about why raising agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most important problems of this century, and it is closely connected to this one.
In the coming months, I will write more about this topic and update many of our charts with some of my colleagues. If you would like to hear about our upcoming work on child labor as it is published, you can subscribe to our newsletter.
Acknowledgments
I thank Bertha Rohenkohl, Pablo Arriagada, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser for their comments on this article.
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Endnotes
The regulation of children’s work was on the agenda of the first International Labour Conference of the ILO in 1919, under the label “Employment of children”. It covered three issues: the minimum age of employment, work at night, and work in unhealthy conditions. You can read more about this history in the 2019 report “Tackling child labour: 100 years of action”
The 43-hour threshold chosen by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians aligns with the standard full-time working week for adults (around 40 to 44 hours under most national laws). Long hours are, in general, recognized as a form of harmful work in international conventions; the 43-hour threshold is how that principle is turned into something measurable from survey data. It’s not a statement that this exact number of hours is intrinsically dangerous.
Some of these children combine agricultural work with school, but many of them don’t. Child labor often means children leave school early or never enter school in the first place. We cover the link between child labor and education on our topic page.
The UN also published estimates under a broader definition of child labor, which includes domestic work of 21 hours or more per week for children aged 5 to 14. These estimates show a different picture: the gender gap in child labor reverses once these chores are counted, with girls slightly more likely than boys to be affected.
You can read more about forced labor and how it affects children in the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, but do bear in mind that the data sources and definitions in that context differ from those we discuss in this article.
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Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2026) - “138 million children are in child labor. What does this actually mean?” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260810-000112/138-million-children-are-in-child-labor-what-does-this-actually-mean.html' [Online Resource] (archived on August 10, 2026).BibTeX citation
@article{owid-138-million-children-are-in-child-labor-what-does-this-actually-mean,
author = {Esteban Ortiz-Ospina},
title = {138 million children are in child labor. What does this actually mean?},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260810-000112/138-million-children-are-in-child-labor-what-does-this-actually-mean.html}
}
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