Supervised Driving Hours by State: 2026 Teen Guide

What are supervised driving hours?

Supervised driving hours are the practice time a teen with a learner's permit must spend behind the wheel with a qualified adult in the front passenger seat before applying for a provisional license. A parent or guardian usually certifies the hours on a state form, and many states require a set number of those hours to happen at night.

Supervised practice is one piece of a bigger system called graduated driver licensing, or GDL. Every state uses some version of it, and knowing where the hours fit helps you plan the whole year, not just the permit months.

Where supervised hours fit in graduated driver licensing (GDL)

• Stage 1, learner's permit: your teen drives only with a supervising adult. This is when the required supervised driving hours get logged, during a mandatory holding period (often 6 to 12 months).
• Stage 2, intermediate or provisional license: your teen can drive alone, but with night-driving curfews and passenger limits. A few states (Iowa, North Carolina and D.C.) require more supervised hours during this stage.
• Stage 3, full license: restrictions lift, usually around age 17 or 18 with a clean record.

Supervised driving hours by state (2026 table)

Here's the full list of supervised driving hours by state, based on the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's graduated licensing table updated October 2026. "Holding period" is the minimum time your teen must hold a learner's permit before moving up a stage.

Source: IIHS graduated licensing laws table (October 2026), plus state DMV publications for Florida, New Jersey and Wisconsin details. Laws change, and some states have extra rules for applicants 18 and older. Always confirm with your state's DMV before your teen's road test.

How states compare: highest, lowest and most common

Once you look at the full table, a few clear patterns jump out. Here's the short version.

The most common requirement: 50 hours with 10 at night

More than half the states use the "50 and 10" formula, including California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Washington. If you've heard "50 hours" from other parents, this is why.

States with the highest supervised driving hours

• Oregon: 100 hours if your teen doesn't take driver's ed (50 with it).
• Maine: 70 hours, 10 at night.
• North Carolina: 72 hours in total across two stages (60 + 12).
• Pennsylvania: 65 hours, including 10 at night and 5 in bad weather.
• Kentucky and Maryland: 60 hours each, 10 at night.

States with the lowest (or no) requirement

• No minimum: Arkansas and Mississippi.
• Waived with driver's ed: Alabama, Arizona, Nebraska and West Virginia. Nevada waives it with a defensive driving course.
• Lowest set numbers: Iowa (20 + 10), Arizona and Texas (30 each).

Night and bad-weather requirements

Ten night hours is standard. Louisiana, Minnesota, New York and Virginia ask for 15, Georgia asks for 6, and Iowa asks for 2 in each stage. Only a handful of states require bad-weather practice: Pennsylvania (5 hours), South Dakota (10 hours), and Alaska, which lets night and inclement-weather hours share the same 10.

Even if your state doesn't require rain practice, do it anyway. The first time your teen drives on a wet highway should not be the first time they drive alone.

Does driver's ed reduce supervised driving hours?

Sometimes, and the rules vary a lot. Here's how driver's education changes the math in different states:

• It replaces the requirement entirely in Alabama, Arizona, Nebraska and West Virginia.
• It cuts the total in half in Oregon (100 hours without, 50 with).
• Instructor time counts extra in Wisconsin, where each instructor hour may count as two.
• Instructor time counts toward the total in Connecticut.
• It's completely separate in states like Texas, where driver's ed instruction hours don't count toward the 30 supervised hours.

Our take: even where driver's ed waives the hours, plan on 50 anyway. A waiver lowers the paperwork, not the risk.

Is 50 hours enough? What the research says

Here's something most guides skip: the number on the form isn't the whole story. The research points to a few honest takeaways.

• Hours on paper don't automatically equal safety. A federal analysis by NHTSA found no clear relationship between the number of hours a state required and fatal crash involvement among young drivers. Part of the reason: most parents didn't know the requirement, so many teens never hit it.
• Real practice does help. A National Academies report found that teens who got more driving exposure as learners had fewer crashes, and suggested states require no less than about 45 hours, the Virginia standard. The same work found that at least half of teens may not be getting their full required hours.
• Safety advocates want more. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety recommends 70 supervised hours. Only Maine requires that many today.

The lesson for parents is simple. Treat your state's number as the floor, log every hour honestly, and make the hours varied. Fifty hours of the same school run teaches less than 30 hours across highways, night, rain and unfamiliar roads.

A practical plan: the 4-stage hour ladder

Here's a framework you can use for any state. It's built around 50 hours, so scale each stage up or down to match your requirement. The idea is to add one new layer of difficulty at a time.

Stage 1: Foundation (hours 1 to 8)

Start somewhere boring on purpose. A big empty parking lot on a Sunday morning lets your teen learn how the car responds without traffic pressure.

Skills to check off

• Gentle stops from 10, 20 and 25 mph
• Hand position, mirror checks and blind-spot glances
• Forward and reverse parking

Stage 2: Neighborhood (hours 9 to 20)

Move to low-speed streets you know well. This is where intersections, right-of-way and pedestrians become real.

Skills to check off

• Full stops and four-way stop etiquette
• Unprotected left turns
• School zones and parked-car awareness

Stage 3: Real traffic (hours 21 to 38)

Now layer on speed, volume and darkness. Aim to get most of your required night hours here, once basic control is automatic.

Skills to check off

• Highway merging and exiting
• Lane changes with a full head check
• Night driving, including glare from oncoming headlights
• At least a few drives in rain

Stage 4: Solo rehearsal (hours 39 to 50 and beyond)

Flip roles. Your teen picks the destination, plans the route and makes every call while you stay quiet unless something is unsafe. This is the closest thing to driving alone, and it's the stage most families skip.

Skills to check off

• Navigating unfamiliar areas without step-by-step help
• Handling a detour or a missed turn calmly
• Practicing the likely road-test route

How many hours per week does your teen need?

Use this formula: required hours ÷ weeks in the holding period = hours per week. Then add a buffer, because school, sports and weather will steal some weeks.

Example: picture an Ohio family whose teen gets a permit at 15 and a half. Ohio needs 50 hours, 10 at night, over at least 6 months. Two 45-minute weekday drives (school pickup and an evening errand) plus one 60-minute weekend drive adds up to 2.5 hours a week. That finishes the hours in about 20 weeks, with roughly six weeks of cushion before the earliest test date.

How to log supervised driving hours (and not lose them)

Most states ask a parent to sign a certification, and some want the full log. Maryland, for example, requires a detailed practice log to be submitted. A lost notebook in month five is a real problem, so set up your system on day one.

What to record for every drive

• Date, start time and end time
• Total minutes, and whether it was day or night
• Weather and road type (residential, highway, rural)
• One or two skills practiced
• Supervisor's initials

Paper log, logging app or trip history?

Use your state's official log or certification form as the final record. Many states publish one, such as New York's MV-262 and Michigan's supervised driving log. A phone logging app is handy, but only if someone remembers to start it. Night hours are the ones families most often lose track of, so double-check those.

If you have a GPS tracker in your car, its trip history makes a great backup. Every drive is recorded with a date, start and end time and the route, so you can fill in the official form accurately at the end of each week. It shows the car's trips, not who was supervising, so your signature on the state form still does the certifying.

After the hours: the first six months of solo driving

Here's the part that surprises many parents. The riskiest time isn't the permit stage, when an adult is in the car. It's the first months after your teen starts driving alone.

• Per mile driven, drivers ages 16 to 19 have a fatal crash rate almost three times as high as drivers 20 and older, according to the CDC.
• Crash risk is highest in the first months of licensure. Per mile, 16-year-olds crash about 1.5 times as often as 18- and 19-year-olds.
• At night, teen drivers' fatal crash rate is about three times that of adults ages 30 to 59.
• Each additional teen passenger raises the crash risk for an unsupervised teen driver.

That's exactly why GDL laws add night curfews and passenger limits after the permit. Your job doesn't end when the log is signed. It just changes shape.

Keep coaching after the license

• Write a parent-teen driving agreement. The CDC offers a free template that covers curfews, passengers, phones and consequences.
• Keep riding along sometimes. A few drives a month with you in the passenger seat keeps skills sharp and habits honest.
• Review real trips together. Talk through a hard merge or a late return the same way a coach reviews game film.

How a GPS tracker fits in (with your teen's knowledge)

A tracker doesn't replace coaching, and it works best when your teen knows it's there and why. Think of it as a light version of the passenger seat. You can see where your car is, replay a trip together, and get a heads-up if a curfew or speed rule is broken, without texting your teen while they drive.

For a teen's car, an OBD-II tracker is the simplest option. You plug it in under the dashboard in about two minutes, it runs off the car's power, and there's nothing to charge. Not sure where the port is? Here's how to find your OBD-II port in 30 seconds.

For a deeper look at choosing one, read our guide on GPS trackers for teen drivers: what every parent should know, or see how parents set up geofence alerts.

Ways to log hours and stay in the loop: compared

No single tool does everything. Here's how the common options stack up for families moving from permit to provisional license.

7 common mistakes parents make with supervised hours

1. Guessing the number. Check the table above, then confirm with your DMV.
2. Backloading night hours. Winter evenings make night practice easy. Summer makes it hard. Plan around the season.
3. Logging from memory. Write each drive down the same day.
4. Repeating the same route. The commute to school becomes autopilot by week three.
5. Skipping highways and rain. These are the conditions teens fear most, which is exactly why they need practice.
6. Stopping at the minimum. The state number is a floor, not a finish line.
7. Disappearing after the road test. The first six months alone are the riskiest. Stay involved.

Frequently asked questions

State requirements summarized from the IIHS graduated licensing laws table (October 2026) and state DMV publications; crash statistics from the CDC. Requirements change, so confirm with your state DMV. Pricing current as of October 2026. This post contains affiliate links; we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Nothing here is legal advice.