Yes. The same background check rules apply to a 17-year-old hire as they do to a 40-year-old one. The Fair Credit Reporting Act doesn't have an age exception.
But here's what actually trips employers up. You order the same report you'd run on any adult candidate, and it comes back mostly empty. That's not a mistake on your provider's end. It's just what a background check on a minor usually looks like.
Written authorization from the candidate. A clear disclosure that you're running a check. A real business reason tied to the job. Those three things apply every time you pull a report, for a teenager or anyone else. Nothing about the FCRA carves out an exception for minors.
So if you're wondering whether you can skip the disclosure form for a 16-year-old because it feels like overkill for a summer cashier job, don't. That part's not optional, no matter how young the hire is.
Here's the part that actually matters for a teen hire. Most people don't build a criminal record before they're 18. So a criminal background check on a 16 or 17-year-old candidate very often turns up nothing, simply because there's nothing there yet.
On top of that, juvenile records work differently than adult ones. In most states, records from cases handled in juvenile court are sealed or confidential by design. That's a deliberate policy choice, meant to keep one mistake at 15 from following someone for life. A standard consumer background check generally can't reach into that system, even when a record does exist.
So to say that again a different way: it's not that your provider is doing a worse job on a minor's report. It's that the record just isn't accessible the way an adult's would be, and often it doesn't exist at all.
Set your expectations around what a teenager realistically has to check, not what a 15-year work history would show.
What you likely won't get: an adult criminal record, because there usually isn't one yet, and a juvenile record, because it's sealed in most states even in the rare case one exists. Don't read a clean report as a green light on character. Read it as what it is: a report with very little to find.
Here's a wrinkle that's easy to miss. The FCRA itself doesn't say a parent has to sign anything. But whether a minor can validly sign a binding authorization form on their own is a separate question, and it depends on your state's contract law, not federal screening law.
In some states, a minor under 18 can't fully bind themselves to a contract without a parent or guardian involved. Since an FCRA authorization is a signed agreement, that can matter. Some employers handle this by having a parent or guardian co-sign the authorization for any candidate under 18, as a practical safeguard rather than a box the FCRA itself requires them to check.
I'm not going to tell you this is required in every state, because it isn't a single federal rule, and I've seen articles state it that way when it just isn't true. Check your state's rule, or ask your background check provider's compliance team, before you decide how to handle this for a hire under 18.
Verify identity. Confirm the candidate is legally eligible to work, including any state work-permit rules that apply to minors, which vary quite a bit by state and by age. Run the criminal check anyway. It costs little and occasionally catches something, especially for an 18-year-old candidate who's newly an adult on paper. Lean harder on references than you would for an experienced adult hire, since that's often where the real signal is.
Skip anything that doesn't fit. A credit check on a teenager with no credit history isn't going to tell you anything useful. Ordering it anyway just adds cost and a form the candidate has to sign for no real benefit to you.
A background check on a minor isn't a smaller version of an adult one. It's a different tool, built for a candidate who hasn't had time to build much of a paper trail yet. Order it for what it can actually tell you, not for what you're used to seeing on someone twice their age.