California Teen Driver’s Permit Practice: 50 Hours, the Log & a Plan That Works (2026)

1. What “Practice” Means in California

Three different things get called “practice” by families, and confusing them is the first mistake. California’s teen licensing system has three separate requirements, and each one has its own hours, its own certificate, and its own purpose. Get the split right and the rest of the page follows naturally.

Driver’s ed is the classroom part: at least 30 hours of instruction in the rules of the road, done before the permit for anyone aged 15½ to 17½. Driver training is the professional part: 6 hours of behind-the-wheel lessons with a licensed instructor, taken after the permit. Supervised practice is the family part: 50 hours of driving with a qualified adult in the front passenger seat. The 30 classroom hours do not count toward the 50. The 6 professional hours do not count toward the 50 either — the DMV’s Supervised Driving Log states the practice is “in addition to the driver training requirements,” and Vehicle Code §12814.6(a)(4) says the same thing in the statute’s own words. So the minimum seat time before the driving test is 56 hours: 6 with an instructor, 50 with a supervisor.

This page covers only the third row: the 50 supervised hours. The permit itself — how to get it, what documents to bring, the $46 fee, the knowledge test, the 12-month application window — is on our California learner’s permit page, which is where this page starts: you have the permit, now you practise. The 30-hour course is on our California driver’s ed requirements page. The knowledge test is on our California DMV written test page, and the practice questions for it are on our California DMV practice test page. What comes after practice — the provisional license, with its 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew and its under-20 passenger rule — is on our California provisional license page. None of those are repeated here in full; this page is the practice chapter of the journey, and the parent hub for the whole under-18 journey is our California teen driver’s license page.

2. The 50 Hours, Explained

The rule is short: before a teen under 18 can get a provisional license, they must complete 50 hours of supervised driving practice (Vehicle Code §12814.6(a)(4)), and at least 10 of those hours must be driving during darkness — night driving. The DMV’s Teen Driver Roadmap states the same three numbers in its practice step: total practice 50 hours, night practice 10 hours of the 50 total, professional training 6 hours. Hold the permit at least 6 months, and the driving test comes after that.

Three misunderstandings account for almost every practice problem families run into. First, the 10 night hours are inside the 50, not on top of them: 40 day hours plus 10 night hours equals 50, not 60. Second, the 6 professional training hours are outside the 50: they do not count toward it, and the 50 do not replace them. Third, the 6-month hold and the 50 hours run at the same time — the hold is the container, and the hours are what you fill it with. A teen who practises steadily for six months finishes both together. A teen who gets the permit and then does not drive for three months will find the hold finished but the hours short: the driving test needs both, and there is no shortcut for the missing hours.

How long does it take to finish 50 hours? The arithmetic is forgiving if you start early and punishing if you do not. Fifty hours over the 6-month hold (about 26 weeks) is about 2 hours a week. That is two 60-minute drives, or four 30-minute drives, or one longer weekend drive plus a short weekday errand run. Driving schools that plan this for families use exactly this arithmetic: 2 hours a week for 26 weeks, with the 10 night hours concentrated in the later weeks. Start in week one and the hours take care of themselves. Start in month five and you need 12 hours a week — more than most families can fit around school, work, and the supervisor’s own schedule — and the driving test has to wait while the hours catch up. The week-by-week plan in section 8 turns this arithmetic into a schedule.

3. Who Can Supervise — and Who Cannot

The supervisor rule is the most misunderstood rule on this page, because it has an exception that changes the answer for most families. The statute (Vehicle Code §12814.6(a)(1)) says a permit holder may practise only when “accompanied by, and under the immediate supervision of, a California-licensed driver 25 years of age or older whose driving privilege is not on probation.” The supervisor sits in the front passenger seat, able to take control of the car if needed.

Then comes the exception, in the same paragraph: “The age requirement does not apply if the licensed driver is the parent, spouse, or guardian of the permitholder or is a licensed or certified driving instructor.” So the 25-year rule does not apply to a parent, a spouse, a guardian, or a licensed instructor. A 22-year-old parent with a valid California license can supervise their own teen. A 22-year-old sibling cannot — a sibling is none of the excepted relationships. That is the trap: the age of the supervisor matters less than who the supervisor is.

Two details matter in practice. First, the supervisor must be in the front passenger seat — not the back seat, not following in another car, not on the phone from home. “Accompanied by, and under the immediate supervision of” means in the car, in the front seat, watching the teen drive. Second, the supervisor must be able to take control: that is why the rule exists. A supervisor who is asleep, intoxicated, or absorbed in a phone is not supervising, whatever their age. And one more distinction that trips up families: the statute’s general floor for an accompanying driver is 18 (Vehicle Code §12509(d)) — but the 25+ figure is the rule for a minor’s supervised practice. Do not plan around 18 for a teen’s practice hours.

4. The DMV Supervised Driving Log

The DMV publishes an official practice tracker called the Supervised Driving Log — a free PDF, also printed inside the DMV’s Parent-Teen Training Guide (DL 603). It is the single most useful document in this whole process, and most families never see it, because no one hands it to them at the DMV office. You can download it from dmv.ca.gov and print it at home.

What the log is: a one-page-per-sheet tracker with a column for the date, a column for the skills practised (using short abbreviations), columns for the day and night minutes, a column for the skills that still need more practice, and a column for the supervising adult’s initials. Its use is optional — the log itself says so, in plain words: “The use of this log is optional and provided for your convenience. If needed, photocopy this driving log before use.” It is not submitted to the DMV and the DMV does not collect it, track it electronically, or audit it line by line. The adult puts initials on each line, not a full signature. Any guide that tells you the examiner “reviews your driving log carefully” or that a parent’s signature is required on every entry is wrong about how the system works.

The log’s real value is not the paper — it is the skill order. The DMV teaches driving in four levels, in order, and the log’s own instruction is: “All skills in each level should be mastered before attempting the next level.” That order is the spine of the week-by-week plan in section 8.

How to use it: print several copies, keep one in the car or on the fridge, and write one line per drive — date, skills practised (by abbreviation), day minutes and night minutes, anything that still needs work, and the adult’s initials. Do it the same day, while the drive is fresh; a log filled in from memory at the end of the month is a log full of guesses. When a sheet fills up, photocopy a blank one and keep going. Keep every sheet in one place — one folder, one clipboard — because a log split across three notebooks is a log that cannot be added up. The point of the log is not to impress the DMV. The point is that it is the only way your family will actually know whether the 50 hours are done, and whether the 10 night hours are really in there.

5. Logging and Certifying the Hours

Here is the part of the system that surprises most parents: nobody at the DMV audits your 50 hours. There is no logbook to submit, no hours to upload, and no examiner who checks your totals. The system runs on the parent’s word. That is not a loophole — it is how the law is written — and it is the reason the log matters: without it, the parent’s word is a guess.

What the law actually requires is a certification. Vehicle Code §12814.6(a)(4) says that on applying for a provisional license, the applicant “shall submit to the department the certification of a parent, spouse, guardian, or licensed or certified driving instructor that the applicant has completed the required amount of driving practice and is prepared to take the department’s driving test.” In practice, the parent signs certifying the 50 hours — including the 10 at night — and that the teen is ready for the test. The DMV’s Parent-Teen Training Guide puts it the same way: make sure your parent has signed your permit verifying the 50 hours of training. If the teen has no parent, spouse, or guardian, or is an emancipated minor, a licensed driver 25 or older or a licensed instructor may complete the certification instead.

What to bring to the driving test, then: the permit itself, and the log if you kept one. The permit is the document that matters — it carries the certification and it proves the 6-month hold. The log is your family’s own record; bring it so the hours are on the table if anyone asks, but do not expect the examiner to read it line by line. And keep the log after the test: if the 12-month application window ever lapses mid-practice and the family has to reapply (section 14), the log is the record that keeps the hours from being lost or re-driven. The statute credits the hold time you already served toward the 6-month requirement — it does not formally “carry over” logged hours by law — but the hours are certified by the parent, and a kept log is what lets the parent certify honestly a second time.

Three logging habits that actually work

Log the same day. A drive logged tonight takes thirty seconds. A drive logged three weeks from now takes a reconstruction, and reconstructions drift upward. Same-day logging is the difference between a true 50 hours and a hopeful 50 hours.

Log every drive, however short. The 15-minute trip to the shops is practice. The school run is practice. Families who log only their long, planned drives usually discover in month five that they have 18 hours, not 50 — and then the test has to wait. Families who log everything finish on schedule without ever scheduling a special practice drive.

Write the skills, not just the minutes. The log’s “skills needing more practice” column is the most useful column on the page. A line that says “Tuesday, 40 minutes, lane changes still shaky” tells the family what to practise next. A line that says only “40 minutes” tells them nothing.

6. The Week-by-Week Practice Plan (26 Weeks)

Here is the plan. Fifty hours over the 6-month hold is about 2 hours a week for 26 weeks, and the plan below follows the DMV log’s own skill order: master each level before the next. The weekly hour figures are a planning guide, not a DMV rule — the DMV requires the totals, not the schedule — but the order is the DMV’s, and it matters: a teen who tries freeway driving in week two has skipped the skills that make freeway driving safe.

Two notes on that table. First, the night hours sit inside the weekly totals: in weeks 20–24, the family’s 2 hours a week are night hours, not extra hours. The plan’s total is 50, not 60. Second, the plan assumes the 6 professional training hours happen alongside it — typically spread across the first months, after driver’s ed is complete. The statute’s own rule is that a student may not take driver training instruction until driver education is successfully completed (except in an integrated program), so the lessons follow the classroom course, not the other way around. The lessons and the family practice reinforce each other: the instructor teaches the skill, the parent’s supervised hours repeat it until it is automatic.

If the family falls behind, the fix is not a heroic final month. Twelve hours a week in month six is not practice — it is cramming, and it does not build the habit the test is checking for. The fix is to restart the arithmetic: count the hours actually logged, count the weeks actually left before the 12-month application window closes, divide, and drive that many hours a week, every week, on real trips. If the window itself is the problem, section 14 explains what happens and how the family’s log and hold credit survive it.

7. Night Driving — the 10 Hours

Ten of the fifty hours must be at night, and night is the part of the requirement families get wrong most often — because “night” does not mean what most people think it means. California law defines the night driving in this requirement as driving “during darkness,” and darkness has a legal definition (Vehicle Code §280): from 30 minutes after sunset to 30 minutes before sunrise, plus any time when visibility is too poor to clearly see a person or a vehicle at 1,000 feet.

The practical consequence is seasonal. A 7 p.m. drive in June — when the sun sets late — may not count as night at all, because darkness has not yet begun. The same 7 p.m. drive in December, when the sun set hours earlier, counts fully. Families who log by the clock (“we drove at 7 p.m., so that is night”) can reach the driving test believing they have 10 night hours when they have far fewer. Log by darkness, not by the clock: if the sun set 30 minutes ago, it is night; if it has not, it is not. The 1,000-feet visibility limb also means that heavy fog or rain in the daytime can count as darkness under the statute’s wording — useful to know, but do not build your night hours on fog; build them on real night driving.

How to build the 10 hours in: start them in the later weeks of the plan (weeks 20–24, about 2 night hours a week for five weeks), on familiar routes first and then on busier roads. Winter evenings are the easiest time to collect night hours, because darkness arrives early; a family whose 6-month hold runs through the winter has a natural advantage. Practise the night-specific skills deliberately: headlights on (and knowing when to dip them), judging distance and speed with less visual information, watching for pedestrians and cyclists who are harder to see, and managing the glare of oncoming headlights. Night driving is required because it is genuinely harder — and because crash risk after dark is higher for new drivers. The 10 hours are not a bureaucratic extra. They are the hours that teach your teen to drive when they can see the least.

8. Freeway and Highway Practice

Yes — a teen with a learner’s permit may drive on the freeway, with the required supervising driver in the front seat. California restricts who must be with a permit holder, not which roads they may use, and nothing in the permit rules bans highways or freeways. The confusion comes from motorcycle permits, which do ban freeways (Vehicle Code §12509.5) — car permit holders have no such ban. Do not import the motorcycle rule into the car.

When to introduce it: Level IV, the last skill level in the DMV’s log, after city traffic is solid. A teen who cannot yet change lanes cleanly in city traffic is not ready to merge onto a freeway at speed. The plan puts freeway work in weeks 17–22 for that reason. The first freeway session should be a script, not an improvisation: a quiet on-ramp, a merge at traffic speed, one or two lanes over with blind-spot checks, a steady following distance, and a planned off-ramp a few exits later. Then repeat it, on different freeways, at different times of day, until merging and lane discipline are automatic rather than nerve-wracking. Parents report that freeway practice is the hardest part to teach — surveys of parents of teen drivers find most say it is hard to prepare their teen on highways — which is exactly why it deserves its own sessions rather than being left to the last week before the test.

One drive-test nuance: the DMV’s drive-test guidance describes freeway driving as part of the supplemental test, and the standard test does not require it — an applicant who does not intend to drive on freeways can decline that portion. That does not mean the family should skip freeway practice. The test is one afternoon; the provisional license that follows it is a year of solo driving, and a new driver who has never merged onto a freeway is a new driver with a gap in their training. Practise it because the road requires it, not because the test does.

9. Residential, City, Freeway: The Progression

The three driving environments teach three different things, and the order matters. Residential streets teach control: starting, stopping, turning, backing up, and watching for children, pets, and parked cars pulling out. City traffic teaches judgement: intersections, traffic lights, lane changes, keeping space, pedestrians at crosswalks, buses and cyclists. Freeways teach speed and discipline: merging, following distance at speed, reading traffic ahead, and exiting cleanly. A teen who has only ever driven residential streets has not practised judgement. A teen who has only ever driven freeways has not practised control. The plan needs all three, in that order.

The signs your teen is ready to move up are visible in the log: turns are smooth without prompting, stops are complete without a reminder, lane changes include a blind-spot check without being told, and the teen narrates what they see ahead without being asked. The signs they are not ready are equally visible: the same skill appears in the “needs more practice” column three weeks running, the teen still needs prompting for the same manoeuvre, or the supervisor is still grabbing for the wheel. When that happens, stay at the current level. The DMV’s own instruction — master each level before the next — is not a suggestion. It is the difference between a teen who is ready for the next environment and a teen who is surviving it.

One more progression worth planning: weather and emergencies, the last two skills in Level IV. Rain changes stopping distances and visibility, and a teen who has only ever driven in dry weather has not practised in the conditions they will actually drive in. A rainy-day practice session — slower speeds, longer following distances, headlights on — is worth more than another dry hour on a familiar route. And the emergency skills in the log (what to do if a tyre blows, if the brakes feel wrong, if another driver cuts in) are best talked through in advance, in the driveway, before they are ever needed on the road.

10. Parent Coaching — How to Teach Without Shouting

Most of the 50 hours are taught by a parent, not an instructor, and most parents have never taught anyone to drive. The DMV’s Parent-Teen Training Guide (DL 603) is the official coaching manual — it contains the Supervised Driving Log and a parent-teen driving contract — and it is worth reading before the first drive, not after the tenth argument. The contract is a simple idea: the family agrees in advance what the rules are (where the teen may drive, with whom, at what hours, and what happens if the rules are broken), and both sides sign it. Agreed rules are easier to enforce than invented ones.

How to coach, in practice: give short, specific instructions, one at a time — “signal, check the mirror, check the blind spot, then move over” — instead of long speeches while the car is moving. Narrate first, then let the teen do it: describe what you are about to do before a manoeuvre, then let them repeat it. Praise the specific thing done right (“that was a clean full stop”) rather than the general (“good driving”). And debrief after the drive, not during it: a two-minute conversation in the driveway about the one thing to fix next time teaches more than ten corrections shouted mid-turn.

Seven parent mistakes — and the fix for each

1. Grabbing the wheel. It startles the teen and teaches them to freeze. Fix: keep your hands off unless a collision is imminent, and use your voice — one short instruction — instead.
2. Shouting. A shouted correction arrives after the mistake, and it teaches the teen to dread the next drive. Fix: speak at normal volume, correct after the manoeuvre, and save the debrief for the driveway.
3. Teaching your own bad habits. Rolling stops, speeding up through yellow lights, one-handed driving — your teen will copy what you do, not what you say. Fix: drive the way the handbook says, at least while you are the supervisor. The test scores the handbook’s rules, not yours.
4. Doing all the talking. A teen who never has to think aloud never learns to scan the road. Fix: ask the teen to narrate what they see — “what is the car ahead doing?” — and let the silence do the teaching.
5. Skipping the log. “We’ll write it up later” becomes a log full of guesses. Fix: one line per drive, the same day, in the car or on the fridge. Thirty seconds, every time.
6. Cramming the hours in the last month. Fifty hours in four weeks is not practice, it is a marathon, and it does not build habit. Fix: 2 hours a week from week one, on real trips, and the hours take care of themselves.
7. Practising only on easy routes. The same quiet loop teaches the same quiet skills. Fix: deliberately add the hard things — a busy intersection, a hill start, a parallel park, a night drive, a rainy day — one new challenge a week.

11. Practice Mistakes That Fail Drive Tests

The driving test is scored against the DMV’s score sheet (form DL 32), and the score sheet has a budget: no more than 15 errors across the scoring manoeuvres, no critical driving errors, and no more than 3 errors on the pre-drive checklist items. That budget is not a target to aim for — it is the ceiling your practice must stay comfortably inside. The way to stay inside it is to practise the specific errors the sheet actually marks, until the correct behaviour is automatic.

If the test does not go well, the retest rules are forgiving but not free: a 15-day wait between failed attempts, 3 attempts before reapplying, and a $9 retest fee (verified on the DMV’s Teen Driver Roadmap). The full retest detail is on our driving-test retake wait page. The cheapest retest is the one that never happens — and the way to avoid it is a mock test in the final weeks of the plan (section 12), run under test conditions, with the supervisor playing the examiner and scoring the drive honestly against this table.

12. Readiness Checklist — the Week Before the Test

Run this checklist the week before the driving test. If any box is unchecked, do not book the test yet — fix the box first. Booking a test your teen is not ready for wastes the appointment, the fee, and the teen’s confidence.

One honest note: a teen who passes this checklist is ready. A teen who passes it barely — 50 hours exactly, 10 night hours exactly, one shaky parallel park — is ready on paper and fragile on the road. An extra two weeks of practice on the weak skills costs nothing and buys a large margin on test day. The provisional license that follows the test is a year of solo driving; the test is the gate, not the goal.

13. Teen vs Adult — the Practice Burden in One Table

Adults have a much shorter road, and the table below is the whole comparison. The adult path still requires an instruction permit, a knowledge test, and a vision exam — there is no way to skip the permit stage — but everything after that is different.

Two notes on that table. First, the 6-month hold applies to the whole under-18 band, including 17½ to 18: the statute (Vehicle Code §12814.6(a)(2)) requires every person under 18 to hold the instruction permit for not less than six months before applying for a provisional license. The DMV’s own FAQ says only that an over-17½ applicant may get the permit without the driver’s ed certificates and cannot take the test until 18 — it is silent on the hold, and one driving school claims the hold “does not apply” at that age. The statute says otherwise, and this page follows the statute. Second, adults should still practise — the table says “none required,” not “none needed.” An adult who books the driving test after two practice drives is legal and unready. The complete adult process is on our first-time driver’s license guide.

14. If the 12-Month Window Lapses Mid-Practice

The permit’s clock is the one deadline families forget. Your California Driver’s License or ID Card Application and the $46 fee are valid for 12 months from the day you apply — the DMV’s Teen Driver Roadmap puts it plainly: “Permits are good for up to one year from the application date.” The 6-month hold, the 50 practice hours, the 3 knowledge-test attempts, and the driving test must all fit inside that window. For most teens that is plenty: get the permit at 15½, hold it 6 months, take the test at 16, and the whole journey fits with months to spare.

What happens if the window lapses first? The DMV’s Instruction Permits page answers this in its own FAQ: if your application expires before you have held your provisional instruction permit for the required six months, you reapply at a DMV office. You pay the $46 fee again and retake the knowledge test and the vision screening. But you do not lose the time you already held the permit: you get cumulative credit for the time you held your instruction permit that counts towards your six-month requirement, and you bring both your expired and your new permits to the driving test to show proof of that credit. And while the permit is expired, you cannot drive on it at all — not even with a supervisor.

The practice angle: keep the log across the reapplication. The statute credits the hold time you already served — it does not formally “carry over” logged hours as a DMV rule — but the hours are certified by the parent, and a kept log is what lets the parent certify honestly the second time, without re-driving hours that were already driven or forgetting hours that were already done. Do not plan around the longer statutory figure, either: California law (Vehicle Code §12509(c)) sets the outer limit for an instruction permit at 24 months from the application date, but the 12-month application window is what expires first in practice, and it is the deadline that forces a reapplication, a new fee, and a new knowledge test. Plan around 12 months. The knowledge test on reapplication follows the same rules as the first time — 80% to pass, 3 attempts, and about a week between attempts for minors (the DMV’s Roadmap states 8 days). The full process version of this story, with the documents and the office visit, is on our California learner’s permit page; the retake rules in detail are on our knowledge-test retake rules page.

15. Insurance While Your Teen Practises

The car your teen practises in must carry at least California’s minimum liability coverage — $30,000 for injury or death to one person, $60,000 for injury or death to more than one person, and $15,000 for damage to property — and proof of it must always be carried in the vehicle. Those are the current minimums (SB 1107, from January 1, 2025); the old 15/30/5 figures still printed on older guides are wrong. When a parent or guardian signs for a minor, they accept financial responsibility for that minor — and under Vehicle Code §17707 the signing parent is jointly and severally liable for damages the minor causes while driving.

In most cases, a teen practising in the family car is covered automatically under the parent’s existing policy, because coverage follows the vehicle rather than the driver. “In most cases” is doing real work in that sentence: some policies have exclusion clauses, and the only way to know is to check your own policy. Tell your insurer when the permit is issued — do not wait until the provisional license — and ask in writing whether the permit-phase practice is covered and what, if anything, changes when the teen is added as a listed driver. The teen must be added as a listed driver when the provisional license is issued; that is the point at which the policy changes, not the permit stage. This page prints no premium price: published estimates for adding a teen conflict by thousands of dollars, and no single figure is verified. The full insurance detail — minimums, what the coverage means, and the choices families face — is on our minimum car insurance guide.

16. Permit Rules in One Box

Everything below is the permit itself, in brief. The detail lives on the sibling pages linked here — this page is about practice, and the permit process is not repeated in full.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• California DMV — Teen Driver Roadmap (driver’s ed, MyDMV accounts, office visit, 8-day knowledge retake wait, 3 attempts, 50 hours / 10 night / 6 hours, 6-month hold, 12-month permit duration, 15-day drive-test wait, $9 retest, provisional restrictions) — dmv.ca.gov
• California DMV — Instruction and Learner’s Permits (15½ to 17½ driver’s ed requirement, over-17½ rule, 30/60/15 insurance, parent financial responsibility, DL 33 out-of-state DE/DT, 12-month application window and cumulative credit, 4:30 p.m. test cutoff) — dmv.ca.gov
• California DMV — Supervised Driving Log (PDF) (optional use, four skill levels I–IV, log columns and abbreviations, “in addition to” the driver training requirements) — dmv.ca.gov
• California DMV — Parent-Teen Training Guide (DL 603) (the official parent coaching manual, containing the Supervised Driving Log and a parent-teen driving contract) — dmv.ca.gov
• California Vehicle Code §12814.6 (25+ supervisor with parent/spouse/guardian/instructor exception, 6-month hold for under-18s, 30 hours classroom + 6 hours training, 50 hours practice with 10 in darkness, parent certification, provisional restrictions) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
• California Vehicle Code §12509 (instruction permit: 15½ minimum, 12-month issue window, 24-month outer limit, supervisor rule, no motorcycles/scooters) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
• California Vehicle Code §280 (darkness: 30 minutes after sunset to 30 minutes before sunrise, plus the 1,000-feet visibility rule) — law.justia.com
• California Vehicle Code §17707 (parent’s joint and several liability for a minor’s driving) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
• Full research brief with the verified-facts table, SERP top-10, five-method gap analysis, competitor errors, and the could-not-verify list: deep-california-teen-drivers-permit-practice.md (November 7, 2026). The 50/10/6 figures, the 6-month hold, the 12-month window, and the 30/60/15 minimums were re-verified live on dmv.ca.gov at build time; Vehicle Code §12814.6 was read in full on leginfo.legislature.ca.gov at build time. No knowledge-test question count is printed on this page because the DMV does not publish one and published sources disagree. The “DL 123” label for the practice log is corrected on this page: DL 123 is an insurance-certification form, and the DMV’s log carries no form number. The 18–21 sixty-day hold claimed by one source is not printed: §12814.6 contains no such rule — its only hold is the 6-month hold for under-18s.

Last verified against dmv.ca.gov: November 7, 2026. Statutes, forms, and fees change — confirm current rules and the current fee schedule on dmv.ca.gov before your visit.