About

This is a reference for what each US state's law requires when it comes to child car seats: when a child must ride rear-facing, forward-facing or in a booster, front-seat age rules, penalties, and exemptions such as taxis, rideshare and buses. Next to the legal minimum, we show what NHTSA and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend, so you can see where the law and the safety recommendation agree and where the law sets a lower bar.

Law and recommendation, side by side

A state's minimum age or weight for moving a child out of a car seat stage is not the same thing as the safest age or weight to do it. Every stage on every state page shows both: the statute's requirement, quoted, and the recommendation from NHTSA and the AAP for the same stage. The two numbers are not always the same, and the page does not try to make them look like they are.

Who runs this

Rule Hub is maintained by a small, independent team that reads statutes and state agency pages directly rather than summarizing other summaries. We are not a car seat manufacturer, a retailer, a state agency or a certified child passenger safety program, and we do not sell anything on this site.

Every fact is sourced

Each figure links to the state statute or state agency page it came from, with the date we last read it there. The statute is the primary source; an agency page is used only when the statute itself does not set a number. Where the two disagree, the statute wins, and the state page says so.

What "not addressed" means

Some statutes are silent on a field — a front-seat age, a rideshare exemption, a numeric booster weight. We do not guess or borrow a number from a neighboring state. When the statute does not set a value, the page says so and names the section we read, so you can see that the absence is a reading of the law rather than a gap in our research.

What this is not

This is not legal advice and not medical advice. It does not replace reading the current statute yourself, the advice of a certified child passenger safety technician, or your pediatrician's guidance for your own child. Confirm anything you plan to act on with the statute or your state's highway safety office before relying on it — every state page links to both.

Corrections

Laws change, and we will sometimes be behind a recent amendment. Pending changes that have been enacted but are not yet in force are shown on the page with the date they take effect. If you find something out of date, we would rather hear about it than have it sit uncorrected.