What Can Kids Buy With Their Own Money? Rules Parents Should Know

Your child comes home with a pack of trading cards, paid for with their own allowance – is that a valid purchase? And what if it had been a phone contract? Can kids buy things with their own money at all, legally? The short answer is yes for the cards and no for the contract, and the reason is the same in the US, the UK and most other countries: the law is relaxed about a child handing over cash for something small, and strict about a child committing to anything. This guide explains where that line runs, why app stores and subscriptions are the real problem, and which family rules keep both the law and the peace on your side.

Can kids buy things with their own money? The short answer: cash is fine, commitments are not

Nobody has ever been taken to court over a 7-year-old buying a candy bar. Shops sell small items to children every day, and no legal system in the English-speaking world treats that as a problem. If your child pays in full, in cash, with money you gave them to spend, the purchase is done – in practice, nobody unwinds it, not you and not the store.

The picture changes as soon as the child does not pay in full and up front. A subscription, a payment plan, a phone contract, an order “on account” or anything charged to a card: these are commitments, and the law protects minors from commitments. The rule of thumb for parents is simple. Cash in, goods out, done is your child’s business. Anything that continues into next month is yours.

Minors and contracts: how the law handles it

United States. Contracts entered by minors – in most states, anyone under 18 – are voidable: the minor can walk away from the deal, the adult on the other side cannot. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute summarizes it as a presumption that the minor did not have the capacity to enter into the contract. The exception is “necessaries”: food, clothing, shelter and similar essentials, which a minor has to pay a reasonable price for. A candy bar is technically a voidable contract too, but a voidable contract that both sides have already fully performed is not something anyone unwinds.

United Kingdom. The same principle: in England and Wales, contracts with anyone under 18 are generally not binding on the minor (in Scotland, the age of legal capacity is 16), with the necessaries exception written into the Sale of Goods Act 1979 – a minor who is sold “goods suitable to the condition in life” of that minor “must pay a reasonable price for them”. The Minors’ Contracts Act 1987, which applies in England and Wales, cleaned up the older rules and lets a court order a minor who backs out of a contract to return what they got under it, if that is “just and equitable”. In practice, a shop that sells a 12-year-old a £3 comic for cash has nothing to worry about, and a wireless carrier that signs a 16-year-old to a 24-month plan does.

Germany, as a clear example. German law spells the cash rule out explicitly. Section 110 of the Civil Code – nicknamed the “pocket money paragraph” – makes a contract by a minor aged 7 to 17 valid from the outset if the minor pays with money that was given to them for that purpose or “for the minor’s free disposition” by their parents. Three conditions: the money came from the parents (or from someone else with their approval), it was free to spend, and the purchase was paid in full. It is a useful mental model even outside Germany, because those three conditions are exactly what makes a child’s purchase uncontroversial anywhere.

Where it gets tricky: app stores, subscriptions and marketplaces

The store on the corner is the easy case. The hard cases are all online, and they share one feature: the money does not come out of the child’s pocket.

• App stores and in-app purchases. A child on a family account buys with the parent’s stored card. Legally, the parent is the buyer, not the child. Apple and Google have refund processes for unintended purchases, and it is worth asking, but there is no right to one. Apple’s Ask to Buy sends every download and in-app purchase to a parent for approval, and in some regions it is switched on by default and cannot be turned off for children under 18; Google Play offers purchase approvals for supervised accounts.
• Subscriptions. A streaming plan, a game pass, a monthly loot box – each is a commitment into the future, and each is charged to an account. Even at $3.99 a month, this is exactly what the law does not let a minor do alone. Paid from a gift card, it ends when the balance does.
• Marketplaces. eBay requires account holders to be 18; Amazon allows under-18s to use its services only with a parent’s involvement. A teenager “selling their old console” is selling on your account, under your name.
• The age-13 line. COPPA, the US children’s privacy law, requires online services directed to children under 13 to get verifiable parental consent before collecting a child’s personal information – which is why so many apps and platforms set 13 as their minimum age. It is a data-protection rule, not a purchasing rule: it says nothing about what a 13-year-old may buy, and it does not stop a 12-year-old from spending your card balance on a game.

Purchase types at a glance

Family rules that work

The law sets the outer frame. What applies in your family is up to you – and a handful of rules prevent most arguments.

If you track allowance and earned money in Pepp – Pepp is currently available in German – the separation helps with this question too: no real money moves in the app. The “Pott” is a balance counter that shows what your child is owed from allowance and completed quests; you pay out in cash or to their account. The question “Was this theirs to spend?” therefore only comes up at the moment you hand the money over. Until then, you can decide together what stays saved and what goes in the wallet.

Conclusion

Can kids buy things with their own money? Yes – as long as it is really their money, really free to spend and paid in full on the spot. That describes almost every purchase a child makes with cash, and no legal system in the US, the UK or Germany gets in the way. Where the law does step in is at commitments: subscriptions, contracts, payment plans and anything charged to your account are voidable, need your approval or are simply not available to a minor. For everyday life that means: allowance is your child’s money, and treating it that way is both the legally sound and the educationally sound choice. Keep goal money separate, keep stores locked, and let the $15 trading-card mistake happen. It is the cheapest lesson your child will ever get.