Share of children in child labor
What you should know about this indicator
- Child labor is defined differently depending on the age group: for children aged 5-11, it includes those who did at least one hour of economic activity; for children aged 12-14, it includes those who did at least 14 hours of economic activity; and for children aged 15-17, it includes those who did at least 43 hours of economic activity during the reference week.
- The definition of child labor also includes children who are doing hazardous work, those who work in hazardous occupations, hazardous industries (mining, quarrying and construction) or working long hours (more than 43 hours per week). The full list of hazardous occupations can be found in the Methodology of the ILO-UNICEF Global Estimates of Child Labour documentation.
- Unpaid household chores — such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare performed within a child's own home — are not counted as child labor under this definition.
- The data does not include the worst forms of child labor that cannot be measured through surveys (trafficking, forced labor, etc.).
- This data comes from nationally representative household surveys, covering around 60% of the global population of children. To construct a global series with complete coverage, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF use a statistical model to estimate child labor prevalence in countries with missing data. You can read more about how these estimates are produced in the Methodology of the ILO-UNICEF Global Estimates of Child Labour documentation.
More Data on Child Labor
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of children in child labor”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2016) - “Child Labor”. Data adapted from International Labour Organization and UNICEF. Retrieved from https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor [online resource]How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
International Labour Organization and UNICEF (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in DataFull citation
International Labour Organization and UNICEF (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Share of children in child labor – ILO and UNICEF” [dataset]. International Labour Organization and UNICEF, “ILO-UNICEF Global Estimates of Child Labour 2024” [original data]. Retrieved May 8, 2026 from https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-laborDownload
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://tests-childlabor-charts.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-children-in-child-labor.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear