Supervised Driving Hours Required by State (2026)

Supervised driving hours by state

Click any column heading to sort. Five states are verified against their agency websites as of August 2026 and link to a detailed requirements page; the rest are drawn from PermitReady's state pages, marked approximate, and should be confirmed with the agency named in the source column.

"Verify" means we do not have a figure we can source honestly for that state. "Not published" means the state sets a total but does not publish a separate night minimum we can cite. Neither means the requirement is zero.

What the spread actually tells you

Three patterns run through the table:

• 50 is the default. More than half of jurisdictions settled on 50 total hours with 10 at night, which is roughly what the research on graduated licensing supports. If you are planning before you know your exact number, plan for 50/10 and adjust.
• Driver education is the lever. The biggest reductions come from approved courses: Oregon halves 100 to 50, Massachusetts drops 40 to 30, Minnesota 50 to 40, and Texas allows the behind-the-wheel portion to shrink to 10 hours. In states where the course is optional, the arithmetic often favors taking it.
• Night hours are the real constraint. Almost nobody fails to reach the total; plenty of families arrive at the road test short on night hours. Fifteen-hour states (New York, Maryland, Louisiana, Minnesota, Virginia) are the ones that bite, and California's 11 PM–5 AM definition is stricter than the sunset-to-sunrise rule everyone assumes.

How states define a "night" hour

This is the most common source of a rejected or re-done log:

• Sunset to sunrise — the most common definition, used by New York and Nebraska among others. What counts shifts with the calendar, which makes winter the efficient time to bank night hours.
• A fixed clock window — California counts 11 PM to 5 AM only. A 7 PM December drive is dark, and does not count.
• "After sunset" — Utah's phrasing, effectively the same as sunset-to-sunrise for practical purposes.
• "Darkness" — Wisconsin's wording, which follows actual conditions rather than a clock.

If your state's wording is ambiguous, log the actual clock time of every drive. A log with start and end times can be re-interpreted under any definition; a log that just says "night" cannot.

Conditions beyond night

A few states require specific conditions on top of the night minimum. Pennsylvania wants 5 of its 65 hours in bad weather. South Dakota wants 10 inclement-weather hours alongside 10 night hours. Alaska frames its 10 extra hours as "progressively challenging conditions," which includes both night and weather. North Dakota asks for practice in variable conditions. If you live somewhere it rains twice a year, these are worth planning around rather than hoping for.

Tracking against your state's number

Knowing the number is the easy half. The supervised hours calculator subtracts what you have already logged and tells you how many total and night hours are left, plus a projected finish date at your current pace.

PermitReady is a free iPhone and iPad app that logs each drive with date, duration, and condition tags, keeps a running total, and works with no account and no internet. It also covers permit test practice for all 50 states plus DC, which is the part that comes first. It does not log drives automatically, does not use GPS, is iOS only, and does not generate a signed state form — it is the record you fill that form in from.

Prefer paper? The printable log templates page has a generic form plus links to each state's official document.

Frequently asked questions