Night Driving Rules in Mississippi

Mississippi has no required supervised driving hours at all. Zero. No night hours, no day hours, no minimum number of any kind. You can walk into the road test without a single logged practice session and it’s perfectly legal.

That should concern you.

What “Night” Means in Mississippi

Mississippi defines night as sunset to sunrise, no clock-based cutoff. When the sun goes down, night starts.

Jackson sunsets range from about 5:10 PM in December to around 8:00 PM in June. A 6 PM drive is night in winter. That same drive is daylight in summer. The definition shifts daily.

There’s no permit curfew either. Permit holders can practice at any hour with a licensed supervisor 21 or older in the front seat.

No Permit Curfew

Mississippi doesn’t restrict when permit holders can drive. The supervision requirement — a licensed adult 21 or older in the car — is the only rule. No late-night restrictions, no hour requirements, no sign-off forms.

Driver’s ed is required for anyone under 18, but completing it doesn’t automatically satisfy any practice requirement. There isn’t one to satisfy.

Why Practice Anyway

Mississippi has one of the highest teen crash rates in the country. In 2022, Mississippi ranked in the top five states for teen traffic fatalities per licensed young driver. The absence of mandatory supervised practice hours is almost certainly part of why.

Night driving accounts for roughly half of fatal teen crashes nationwide, while teens drive far less than half their miles after dark. The risk is real and it’s concentrated after sunset.

No law will force your teen to practice at night in Mississippi. But the roads don’t care about the law.

Here’s a reasonable baseline: 40–50 total supervised hours, with at least 10 of them after sunset. That matches what stricter states require. It’s not arbitrary — it’s what states that analyzed crash data settled on.

What night practice should cover:

• Low-traffic suburban streets first, then busier roads
• At least a few sessions on the highway
• Rain: it’s harder than either condition alone
• Rural driving if that’s relevant to where your teen will actually drive

Jackson’s mild winters make this manageable. Sunset in December is around 5:10 PM, which means a drive starting at 5:30 PM is a night drive. You don’t need to stay up late to log night hours in winter.

Mississippi Permit Requirements

Requirement	Details
Total supervised hours required	0
Required night hours	0
Night definition	Sunset to sunrise
Permit curfew	None
Minimum permit age	15
Permit hold period	6 months
Supervisor minimum age	21
Driver’s ed required	Yes (under 18)

Practical Tips

Don’t treat zero as the goal. The law requires nothing, but that’s a floor, not a target. Treat this the same way you’d treat a state that requires 40 hours — because the roads are identical.

Track what you do. Even with no legal requirement, keeping a log is useful. You’ll know exactly how many night sessions your teen has had, what conditions they’ve driven in, and where the gaps are. If something goes wrong later, you’ll have a real record of the practice they got.

Start night drives early in the permit period. Don’t push them to the end. Night driving takes adjustment — eyes adapt differently to headlights, depth perception changes, road edges are harder to read. Your teen needs time to get comfortable, not a crash course the week before the test.

Cover different road types. Mississippi has a lot of rural two-lane roads. If your teen is going to drive those after getting their license, they need supervised night practice on them first. A residential street after dark isn’t the same preparation.

Moda tracks your sessions and splits them by day and night automatically. It won’t tell you what the law requires — in Mississippi, the law requires nothing. But it’ll tell you exactly what your teen has actually done.

For full Mississippi permit requirements, see our Mississippi permit hours guide.

Download: Moda on the App Store

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