Internship Job Description Template

Last updated August 2026. We revised this post to replace the Department of Labor’s six-factor unpaid internship test, which was rescinded in 2018, with the primary beneficiary test that actually applies today.

The Anatomy of a Great Internship Job Description

An internship job description is not a shorter version of a full-time job description. The candidate has no career to point to yet, so the posting has to sell something else: what they will be able to do in September that they cannot do today.

That is the whole pitch. Compensation matters, and so does the chance of a full-time offer, but employability is what a student is buying. Build the posting around the skills the internship teaches and you will get better applicants than the company down the street offering the same money.

Paid or Unpaid

Decide this before you write a word, because it changes everything downstream.

A paid internship is simpler. There is no classification question to reason about, and you reach students who cannot afford to work for free. If the budget will not cover a full-time summer hire, twenty paid hours a week is often more attractive to a student than forty unpaid ones, and it costs you less than a full-time seat.

An unpaid internship is lawful when it is built as a learning experience, and plenty of good employers run them well. That structure is not a loophole. Supervising a student who has never held a professional job takes real time from people who have other work to do, and the teaching is the point. Small firms in particular often have the mentorship to offer well before they have the payroll.

For whatever it is worth as one data point rather than a rule: we partnered with local coding boot camps three separate times, two interns each time, and we chose to pay in every case. The primary goal was their learning rather than our output, and paying kept that simple. We enjoyed it more than we expected to. That was the right call for our situation, and yours may be different.

What matters is that the arrangement matches what you are calling it. The legal section below covers where that line sits, and the rules are more workable than most employers think.

Four Rules for Writing the Posting

1. Lead with what they will learn

Put “paid” in the job title if it is paid. Students scan.

Then name the skills. “Gain marketing experience” tells a student nothing. “Build and send email campaigns in HubSpot and report on open and click rates” tells them exactly what goes on their resume. Named tools, named deliverables. If the internship might lead to a full-time offer, say so in the opening paragraph, and never guarantee it.

2. Describe the actual job, not a generic one

Every job posting claims the work is fast-paced and inspiring. When everything is fast-paced and inspiring, nothing is, and plenty of good candidates do not want fast-paced anyway.

If the work is methodical and precise, write that it is methodical and precise. This feels like a mistake and it is not. People who like methodical work will self-select in, and those are the people who will do the job well. Honesty is the differentiator here because so few postings use it.

3. Keep the requirements realistic

Interview the person who will supervise the intern before you write the responsibilities. You will get concrete tasks instead of guesses, and the posting will describe the job that exists rather than the one you imagine.

Then read your requirements list back. Asking for three to five years of experience in an internship posting is common and self-defeating. Anyone with three years of experience is not applying for an internship.

4. Cover the legal basics

Every application asks whether the candidate can perform the essential functions of the job with or without accommodation. Your posting has to be complete enough that they can answer honestly. List the real duties. A thin job description creates problems later when a supervisor asks a new hire to do something that was never in it.

The Unpaid Internship Rules Changed, and Most Guidance Online Is Stale

This is worth being precise about, because a lot of the template posts ranking for this topic still publish a test the Department of Labor threw out.

Until 2018, the DOL used a six-factor test in which every factor had to weigh in the employer’s favor. One of those factors required that the employer derive no immediate benefit from the intern’s work, which made almost any useful internship look unlawful. Four federal appellate courts rejected that test. In January 2018 the DOL gave it up and rewrote Fact Sheet #71: Internship Programs Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which is still the current guidance.

The standard now is the primary beneficiary test, and it asks one question. In the economic reality of this relationship, who benefits more, the intern or the employer? If it is the intern, the intern is not an employee under the Fair Labor Standards Act and does not have to be paid. Seven factors inform that answer and none of them decides it alone:

• Whether both sides clearly understand there is no expectation of compensation.
• Whether the internship provides training similar to what an educational environment would give.
• Whether the internship is tied to formal education through coursework or academic credit.
• Whether the internship corresponds to the academic calendar and accommodates the intern’s class commitments.
• Whether the internship lasts only as long as it provides the intern with beneficial learning.
• Whether the intern’s work complements the work of paid employees rather than displacing it.
• Whether both sides understand the internship comes with no entitlement to a paid job at the end.

In practice the test is easier to satisfy than the one it replaced. An unpaid internship tied to academic credit, running on the school calendar, supervised rather than production-focused, usually clears it. An unpaid intern doing work you would otherwise hire someone to do usually does not.

Two things the seven factors do not cover. Several states apply a stricter standard than federal law. And this analysis is for private for-profit employers; nonprofits and public agencies operate under different rules.

State rules can be stricter, and they vary a lot

Federal law is the floor. Two examples show how differently states handle the same question.

New York runs its own eleven-criteria test, and all eleven must be met. The New York State Department of Labor’s guidance for for-profit businesses (PDF) takes the six criteria from the old federal test and adds five of its own. That means New York still requires that the internship provide no immediate advantage to the employer, the exact requirement the DOL abandoned in 2018. New York also requires written notice to the intern before the internship starts, prohibits employee benefits of any kind, and requires that the training be general enough to qualify the intern to work at any similar business rather than being specific to your operation.

One New York criterion applies directly to the job description itself: advertisements and postings for the program have to be worded in terms of education or training rather than employment, though you may note that qualified graduates could be considered for a job. If you post unpaid internships in New York, the wording of the posting is part of the compliance question, not just a marketing decision.

California is less settled, which is its own kind of risk. There is no California statute or regulation that expressly exempts interns from state minimum wage law. The Division of Labor Standards Enforcement looks to federal interpretations where they do not conflict with state law, and its most recent published guidance on internships is an April 2010 opinion letter (PDF) that applies the old six-criteria federal test. The DLSE has not published guidance adopting the 2018 primary beneficiary test. Until it does, a California employer should assume the older, stricter analysis may still be applied and plan accordingly.

These are two examples, not a survey. Check your own state labor department before you rely on the federal test alone, and check every state you place interns in if you operate in more than one.

Structuring an unpaid internship so it holds up

If you are running an unpaid internship, these are the things that put the factors on your side. Most of them are also what makes the internship worth doing for the student.

• Tie it to their school. Academic credit, or a program the career center recognizes, weighs directly in your favor.
• Run it on the academic calendar. A semester or a summer, with a defined end date.
• Put the expectations in writing before they start. No compensation, no guaranteed job at the end, both understood up front.
• Name a supervisor and give them the time. Supervision is a factor in the analysis and the reason the internship has value.
• Build the work around learning. Projects, shadowing, and exposure across the desk. If the intern is covering a seat you would otherwise fill, the arrangement is a job.
• Keep a record. The written agreement, the credit paperwork, and what the intern actually worked on. If the classification is ever questioned, that file is the answer.

What Every Internship Posting Needs

Check the posting against this list before you publish:

• Whether it is paid, and how much. In the title if paid, with a number or range in the body.
• Start and end dates. Internships are bounded. Students are planning a semester around this.
• Hours per week, and whether the schedule bends around classes.
• Location, and whether it is onsite, hybrid, or remote.
• Whether academic credit is available. For many students this decides whether they can accept.
• Who the intern reports to. It is a selling point and a legal factor at the same time.
• The specific skills the intern will build. Named tools, named deliverables.
• Five or six concrete day-to-day tasks.
• Requirements that someone without a career could meet.
• How to apply, and the deadline.

Internship Job Description Template

Copy this into a document and replace the italicized text. Add detail where the internship is more involved, and cut it where the internship is simpler.

The Same Template, Filled In

Here is what the finished version looks like. The company is made up. The level of detail is the point.

Where to Post It

General job boards are the weakest channel for internships. Students are not there in the numbers you want, and your posting competes with full-time listings for attention.

Start with university career centers. Every school has a coordinator whose job is employer relationships, and a good one will route your posting directly to the right department. That single relationship outperforms a paid listing and it repeats every semester.

Handshake is where a large share of U.S. students actually look, and most universities use it as their official career platform. If you hire interns on any regular basis, be there.

Faculty are the channel most employers skip. A professor forwarding your posting to their upper-level students carries an endorsement no job board can buy.

Then your careers page, LinkedIn, and your former interns. Students who had a good experience refer their classmates, and that referral costs nothing.

Common Questions

Do you have to pay interns?

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a for-profit employer has to pay an intern when the intern is legally an employee, and the Department of Labor decides that with the primary beneficiary test. If the intern gets more out of the arrangement than the employer does, the intern is not an employee and no pay is required. If the employer benefits more, the intern is owed minimum wage and overtime. Nonprofits and public agencies follow different rules, and several states apply stricter standards than federal law.

How long should an internship job description be?

An internship job description should run about one page, the same length as a standard resume. If yours runs longer, the requirements list is usually the padded part. Five or six concrete responsibilities and four or five realistic requirements is enough.

Do I have to include pay in an internship job posting?

A growing number of states require pay ranges in job postings, including internships, so check your state law before you publish. Beyond compliance, listing pay in an internship posting matters more than it does for experienced roles, because students have no reference point for what the work should pay and will skip a listing rather than guess.

What should an internship job description include?

An internship job description should include whether the role is paid and how much, the start and end dates, hours per week and whether the schedule flexes around classes, the location and work arrangement, whether academic credit is available, who the intern reports to, the specific skills the intern will build, five or six day-to-day responsibilities, realistic requirements, and how to apply with a deadline.

What is the difference between an internship and an entry-level job?

An internship is time-bounded, structured around learning, and usually tied to a student’s education. An entry-level job is ongoing employment with no built-in end date and no learning structure attached to it. If a role has no end date and no teaching component, it is a job rather than an internship, and it should be posted and paid as one.

When should you post a summer internship?

Post a summer internship in the fall or early winter if you can. Timelines vary a lot by industry: the most competitive finance and consulting programs close their applications in the fall, while most other fields stay open well into spring, and more than half of employers keep recruiting on a rolling basis after their initial posting window closes. Posting late is not fatal, but it means competing for students who have not already accepted somewhere else.