You have to be at least 13 years old to use Instagram in most of the world, and the age requirement for Instagram is set higher in a few places, including Florida, South Korea, Spain, and Quebec.1Instagram. Report a Child Under 13 on Instagram Meeting the minimum doesn’t get a teen the full adult app either. Everyone under 18 is placed into a restricted “Teen Account” with privacy, messaging, and content limits switched on by default.
The Minimum Age and Where It’s Higher
Thirteen is the global floor. The number tracks the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law enforced by the FTC that blocks sites and apps from collecting personal information from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent.2eCFR. 16 CFR Part 312 – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule Rather than build a consent pipeline for every 10-year-old who wants an account, Instagram simply keeps under-13s out.
A handful of jurisdictions push the age up. Instagram lists Florida, South Korea, Spain, and Quebec as places with different age requirements that override the global 13.1Instagram. Report a Child Under 13 on Instagram If you live in one of those regions, your teen may need to be 14 or older before they can sign up.
What a Teen Account Actually Looks Like
Since late 2024, every account belonging to someone under 18 is automatically enrolled in a Teen Account, and the teen can’t turn the restrictions off without a parent’s involvement.3Meta. New Instagram Teen Accounts: Default Settings The defaults matter, because they are the real answer to “what does my kid get when they turn 13.”
- The account is private. Only approved followers can see posts and stories.
- Messaging is limited to people the teen already follows or is connected to, and the strictest Hidden Words filter is on, hiding potentially offensive message requests and comments.3Meta. New Instagram Teen Accounts: Default Settings
- Sleep mode runs from 10 PM to 7 AM every day. Notifications are muted, auto-replies go out to incoming messages, and the teen sees a reminder to close the app.4Instagram. About Instagram Teen Accounts
- After 60 minutes of use in a day, a reminder nudges the teen to put the phone down.
- Only accounts the teen is connected to can tag or mention them.
Content is also filtered. In late 2025, Meta aligned Teen Account content settings with the 13+ movie rating standard, so by default a teen sees material roughly equivalent to a PG-13 film.5Meta. Instagram Teen Accounts Will Be Inspired by Movie Ratings for Ages 13+ A teen can’t loosen that on their own; a parent has to enable supervision and grant permission for any change.6Family Center. Instagram 13+ Content Settings for Teens A stricter “Limited Content” option filters more aggressively for parents who want tighter controls. Meta has said it uses age-prediction technology to place teens into these protections even when they lie about their age at signup and claim to be adults.
How Instagram Checks the Age You Enter
The first check is the birthday you type in at signup. That’s easy to fake, and everyone knows it. The tougher checks kick in when Instagram suspects a lie, usually when someone tries to change their listed birthday from under 18 to over 18, or when another user reports the account as underage.
At that point you get two ways to prove your age. You can upload a government-issued ID showing your face and date of birth; Instagram says the image is deleted from its servers after verification. Or you can record a short video selfie, following on-screen prompts like turning your head. Instagram sends a still from the video to Yoti, a company that specializes in age estimation. Yoti’s AI estimates your age from your facial features and returns that estimate. Neither company keeps the image afterward.7Meta. Introducing New Ways to Verify Age on Instagram
The AI is not exact. A NIST evaluation of facial age-estimation technologies found that even top-performing algorithms had a mean absolute error of about 3.9 years when estimating the age of 17-year-olds, and only about 24 percent of estimates for that age group landed within three years of the correct age.8NIST Pages. Face Analysis Technology Evaluation: Age Estimation and Verification The technology performs worse across adolescence, which is exactly the age range where a social media platform needs it most.
What Happens If Instagram Decides an Account Is Underage
If Instagram determines an account belongs to someone under 13, the account is disabled.1Instagram. Report a Child Under 13 on Instagram Anyone can report a suspected underage account, and that triggers the verification process above. If the account holder can’t prove they’re old enough, the account goes away.
Mistakes happen, most often when someone enters the wrong birth year at signup. You can appeal. When you try to log in, Instagram shows on-screen instructions for requesting a review.9Instagram. About Disabled Instagram Accounts You’ll usually need to send a government-issued ID showing your real date of birth. Response times run from a couple of days to several weeks. If nothing comes back within two weeks, submitting again is worth trying.
Accounts a Parent Runs for a Younger Child
A child under 13 cannot operate their own Instagram account, but a parent or manager can run one that represents a young child, such as a child actor’s page. The bio must clearly say the account is managed by an adult, and Instagram can ask for identification proving the person running it is over 13.1Instagram. Report a Child Under 13 on Instagram The child themselves should never log in, post, or reply to messages.
What a Parent Can Do Once a Teen Is On
If your teen is 13 to 17, you can link your account to theirs through Meta’s Family Center. Both sides have to agree; neither the parent nor the teen can force it. Only one parent can supervise a given teen at a time, and the supervising parent must be over 18.10Instagram. Set Up Teen Supervision on Instagram
Once supervision is active, you can cap daily time on the app, customize the sleep-mode hours, see who your teen has recently been messaging (though not the content of those messages), view broad topic categories they’ve been exploring such as music or animals, and temporarily block Instagram entirely through the dashboard.11Meta. Supervision Tools for Teen Accounts
If your teen won’t consent to supervision, you’re left with the built-in Teen Account defaults rather than the enhanced controls. Those defaults still do real work, but the extra levers only exist once both sides opt in.