138 million children are in child labor. What does this actually mean?

Reporting by Our World in Data

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.

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:

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.

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.

Close to half of all child labor under these definitions corresponds to non-hazardous work done by children under 12.