Yes, you can drive at night with a Georgia learner’s permit. Any hour, any day of the week, as long as a licensed adult who’s 21 or older is in the car. Georgia’s curfew (10 PM for drivers under 17, midnight for 17-year-olds) only applies after you get your Class D provisional license, not during the permit stage.

When does “night” start in Georgia?

Georgia defines night as sunset to sunrise. No fixed clock time.

In Atlanta, sunset ranges from around 5:20 PM in December to 8:30 PM in June. That’s a 3-hour swing. A 6 PM drive counts as a full night session in January. The exact same drive in July is still afternoon, an hour and a half before sunset.

If you’re tracking on paper, you’d need to look up your local sunset time before every session. That changes daily and varies by location. A family in Savannah has slightly different sunset times than one in Rome, Georgia. Moda checks the exact sunset for your GPS coordinates at session start and tags the drive accordingly.

The 6-hour requirement

Georgia requires just 6 night hours out of 40 total. That’s the lowest requirement in the country. Most states want 10. Louisiana, Minnesota, Virginia, and New York require 15. Georgia asks for 6.

Six hours isn’t much — and that’s actually a good thing. With a full 12 months to log 40 hours, you’re averaging less than 1 hour of total driving per week. Even if you dedicated one short post-sunset drive every two weeks, you’d hit 6 night hours with months to spare.

The 12-month hold period is one of the longest nationally. Most states allow you to apply for the provisional license after 6 months. Georgia makes you wait a full year. That extra time takes pressure off the night hours entirely. There’s no crunch.

Curfew vs. night hours

These aren’t the same thing, and Georgia keeps them separate.

During the permit stage: no curfew. You can drive at any hour with a qualified supervisor present. A midnight practice drive on a Saturday counts.

After you get your Class D license: the curfew applies. Under 17 can’t drive between 10 PM and 5 AM. At 17, the window tightens: midnight to 5 AM.

None of that affects your permit. The 6 night hours you’re logging happen while the curfew doesn’t exist yet.

Getting the 6 hours done

With only 6 hours to hit, strategy is almost unnecessary. But the families who do it cleanly start early rather than waiting.

One post-sunset drive per week from October through December gives you 6+ hours before winter’s even over. In Georgia winters, sunset before 5:30 PM means you can squeeze a 30-minute session in before dinner most evenings. No late nights, no special scheduling.

Even if you don’t start until spring, two or three dedicated evening sessions per month gets you to 6 hours inside two months.

Don’t stop at 6. The minimum is the floor, not the target. Night driving is harder: headlights and shadows, reduced depth perception, reading the road differently. Six hours is barely enough to get comfortable. Log more if you can.

Georgia permit requirements

Requirement	Details
Total supervised hours	40
Night hours	6
Night definition	Sunset to sunrise
Minimum permit age	15
Permit hold period	12 months
Supervisor minimum age	21
Curfew (permit stage)	None
Driver’s ed	Required (under 18)

Practical tips for Georgia

Driver’s ed is required for anyone under 18. You have to complete it before you can get the permit, so plan the timeline accordingly: a teen who turns 15 in September and wants to start driving in October needs to be enrolled in a driver’s ed course immediately.

The 12-month hold is long but useful. Don’t rush. Use the year to practice in actual varied conditions: rain, fog, highway, city, residential, and yes, night. Teens who pace the year and hit 50–60 hours instead of the required 40 test noticeably better.

Sunset in Georgia shifts a lot across seasons and changes day-to-day. Atlanta in December sees sunset around 5:22 PM, but by March 1st it’s already 6:16 PM. Because Georgia’s night definition is sunset-to-sunrise, Moda tracks this automatically. It pulls your exact GPS coordinates and applies the correct sunset time for that day so your log holds up when the DMV reviews it.

Download: Moda on the App Store

Stop manually tracking hours. Moda logs driving automatically.

Auto-detects night driving, exports DMV forms, and syncs across family phones.