12 Highest Paying Teen Jobs ($10-$20/hr)

After the $15 online jobs video some of you were asking for more job options for people under the age of 18. So today we're going to take a look at 12 of the highest paying jobs you can get as a teenager. So we'll go through this list and I'll give you guys some ideas to get started as well as some ways you can expand some of these outside of just the basic job. Then at the end I'll show you how you can actually go and find the highest paying jobs in your area. The first one on the list is an in-store shopper. Especially in the last year when we've seen less people actually leaving their homes to go get groceries, in store shoppers are in a lot higher demand than they were in previous years. Typically being an in-store shopper is going to pay a lot more than just being a bagger or a cashier or stocking the shelves at a grocery store. Now unfortunately a lot of the apps that are built specifically for in-store shopping like Instacart are going to require you to be 18. So a way to get around that is to just apply for in-store shopping positions through the actual grocery store chains themselves. So if you have a Walmart nearby or a Kroger, or Ralph's, or whatever grocery store chain in your area - now most of those are offering their own in store shopping options so you can apply directly to those. Sometimes though they will require you to first be a cashier or a bagger or take some lower paying position and eventually build up to being those in-store shoppers or the curbside delivery people. For this job you can typically expect to make somewhere between $10-$20/hr again just depending on which state you live in and which grocery store you're actually doing this for. My guess would be that Walmart probably does not pay as much as whole foods, but again it just depends on your area. One of the downsides to this is that the grocery store may not let you accept tips from customers which you would be able to do through an app. But again if you're under 18 and that's your only option, hopefully that hourly pay is enough to make up for it. Next on the list is a restaurant host. These are the people when you first walk into a restaurant that are usually behind a little stand. They seat you, they determine which table to put you at, which waiter to put you with, and typically the hourly pay for a restaurant host is going to be higher than the waiters. The only downside is that depending on what restaurant you work at you may or may not get a split of the tips. For this job you can typically expect to make between $9-$15/hr. Again you may or may not get tips. But my tip for you is to go with the higher profile restaurants. So a steakhouse is likely going to pay you a lot more than a fast food restaurant. But getting that host or hostess position at a steakhouse is going to be a lot more competitive than getting it at a smaller restaurant. Next on the list is to be a nanny or an au pair. So babysitting is like the most basic job that you could put on one of these lists, but if you are a nanny instead of just being a babysitter, typically there's a little bit more stability with that, and a little but higher expectations of you. So with a nanny position, you would typically go to someone's house on set days of the week for set amounts of time and they would pay you to take care of their kids. Whereas with babysitting I think of that more as just going and watching peoples kids kind of whenever they need you to, kind of randomly. So a nanny position you could expect to make somewhere between $10-$20/hr just depending on the family. But a cool alternative to this is if you want to go abroad and be a nanny you can actually become an au pair. You usually need to be a minimum of like 16 or 17 years old to do this. But you can pretty much go to any country in Europe, South America, southeast Asia, anywhere you want to go and you can be a nanny there. They call this position being an au pair and you can typically expect to make somewhere between $300-$700 USD/mo. Typically, you would go to that country, you would live with or near the family. So your housing would be covered, sometimes most or all of your food is covered, and you get paid additional on top of that to actually watch their children. So that could be a cool option if you are in late high school, or college, or taking a gap year, or if you're just doing school online and you can do it from anywhere that could be a cool opportunity to go to a different country once borders start opening up again. The next job is to be a lifeguard or a swim instructor. And a lot of times these kind of go hand in hand. So lifeguards will typically make somewhere between $10/hr and $20/hr depending on if you are a beginner lifeguard, if you have a lot of swimming experience, or if you eventually work your way up to becoming the pool manager for whatever pool you're working at. Sometimes gyms or country clubs will pay more than just your community pools, so that's a good option to look into as well. Now typically what happens, is when you become a lifeguard, people will approach you for swim instruction anyways for their kids or maybe even for themselves. And for that depending on your swim experience, you could potentially make anywhere between $20 and $60 a lesson. Another way to structure that would be to offer group lessons. So you could discount that rate per lesson but you could get maybe 3 or 4 kids that you teach all at once. If you want to be outside and working by a pool but you aren't really a people person, you could be a pool cleaner instead. If you're working for a pool cleaning company, you could expect to make anywhere between $12-$18/hr. But I think that a good approach to this would be working for someone else's pool cleaning company for a year or two, and then maybe the next year starting your own. You would of course have some costs to buy equipment and the different chemicals that you need to actually clean the pools, but once you start your own pool cleaning business I have seen people charge between $60 and $100 an hour or per pool cleaning session. So if that ends up being something that you like doing, you could always start your own business and potentially make a lot more from that. Then you could even hire your own friends to help you out with your pool cleaning business. Next we have power washing or pressure washing. Again this is going to be outside, more of a summer job, but if you can find a power washing company to work for you could make anywhere between $12-$20/hr again. And just like the pool cleaning, if you wanted to you could eventually start your own. But power washing equipment can be pretty expensive. So starting out it may be better to work for someone else or to go and find a cheap power washer and see how well that works, and see if you do want to start your own business. A more fun job that you could try is to be a photography or videography assistant. You can typically make somewhere between $10-$15 an hour depending on if you are just starting out or if you already have a lot of experience with photography or videography. So you could try to go to some different studios and get jobs helping them there. But I think that an easier way to approach this is to find local photographers in your area. Maybe they do graduation photos, maybe they do wedding photos - but reach out to them directly and see if they would be interested in having an assistant. That way you can kind of learn about what they do as you also help them with their own job. Kind of similar to that you could also be a social media intern or a social media assistant. If you're on YouTube watching this I assume that you probably know how to use some other social media platform. So it's great to go to local businesses or again people who have their own independent businesses in your area. Ask them if they need help running their Instagram page or their TikTok page. And this is great if you ever think that you want to work in some sort of marketing position or you do want to continue to work with social media. This will give you good experience and you can potentially make somewhere between $10-$15/hr doing this one as well. If you're someone that likes cars, instead of car washing you could do car detailing. So if you do car detailing, and especially if you're in an area where people bring in nicer cars, you could make $10-$15/hr doing this as well. Now a fun idea for this would be to actually see if you can film some of the detailing that you're doing, and then you can go and put it on TikTok. I've seen some channels where they are deep cleaning cars or even houses - but they are able to not only make that hourly wage from their job, but then sometimes they're able to get brand deals or other opportunities by posting those videos on TikTok. If you do that and you're able to get some money to buy your own equipment to do car detailing yourself, you may even get people who ask if they can bring their car directly to you instead of you doing it through another company. The next idea is to do digital design work. And depending on how good you already are, you could make anywhere between $10-$25/hr. Usually with design work people don't really care how old you are, they just want to see that you are able to do good work and that you can help them grow their own business by making nice looking brochures or websites or Instagram posts. So if you can use photoshop or even if you can use something like Canva really well, you can definitely help out business owners in your area and get jobs doing different design work for them. And so that could be a fun job to do during the summer or even after school. Luckily that one isn't seasonal. Anyone can use design work any time of the year. You could look at doing this online. But again a lot of websites like Fiverr and Upwork are going to require you to be 18. So the easiest approach I think is to just go to local boutique stores or different local business like maybe even your dentist office, and ask them if they would be willing to hire you to help them with any graphic work. The next idea is to just flip items. So these can be items that you buy off of Facebook Marketplace, they could be items that you buy at Goodwill or a local thrift shop. They could be from flea markets. You can pretty much flip anything you want - from furniture to cell phones to any sort of electronics or even camera equipment. This is great especially if you are already looking on Facebook Marketplace and going to thrift stores and garage sales regularly. You can definitely make money by buying items at a low price and selling them for more. And I've seen people build up entire furniture flipping businesses just on Facebook Marketplace. And the last option we can kind of debate if this is a job or not - but if you have some extra money already and you are kind of just looking for a way to fill your time and to learn more skills as well, you could actually look into going to a trade school instead of getting a job during the summer. So trade schools are typically for things like becoming a hair dresser, working on cars, maybe welding, or construction. So usually you do have to pay to go to a trade school - so that's going to be losing you money. But the benefit of this is that in a year or in 2 years you may be able to get your license to actually do this full time. When you're in trade school there are also opportunities to go and work for actual businesses. And that's kind of an easy route to actually get into a real job. So for example if you wanted to become a hair dresser for a living - usually in your trade school you would be able to practice this on real people who come in they can get their hair cut at a discounted price but you do still get paid. And usually after you have been in the trade school for a while, there are opportunities to go and work for actual businesses who regularly hire from you trade school. So then you have an actual real, full time, full paying job. So now I'm going to share my computer screen and I'll show you how to actually find go and find the highest paying jobs in your area if you do want to be something like an in-store shopper or a hostess or a lifeguard or something like that. Okay so one way that you could approach this is to just Google "how much does Whole Foods pay in Santa Monica" but you're likely going to get kind of a random range of numbers. So we're going to go on Glassdoor instead. And you do have to make an account to see the actual salary numbers. But if you just have like a spam email or an email that you use for junk you can definitely sign up with that. So we're going to search for Whole Foods. And we're going to put in our city - Santa Monica. And so a good idea for this is to search in your city and maybe in some of the surrounding areas if it's close by. Because if you go to a higher income neighborhood, most likely you'll be able to be paid more there. So you can definitely compare it that way too. But we're going to select the company, and then once we're on this page, make sure that you're on this "Salaries" tab. And then from here, we can see their different departments, and when you click on these, you'll actually be able to see the salaries that real people have reported and you'll be able to see the average of those. So right there we see in store shopper. So let's see how much Whole Foods pays in store shoppers in Santa Monica. $15/hr base pay. So you can go and compare that to other places. And where it says United States you can also click on that and narrow down the area again. So you may have to select your city again, but that is how you find the salaries. And then if you go and interview for the job, you can make sure that you are making a fair wage. If you're interested in learning about some online jobs that could pay $15/hr or more, go ahead and click on this video and I will see you guys over there.