How old do you have to be to legally move out?

In practice, it's pretty rare for anyone to get charged with supporting/helping a teen who leaves home. So if you could find someone to take you in, likely that could be made to work.

But there's a bigger issue here: You are mostly glossing over the difficulties of supporting yourself. It is near impossible to live comfortably on a minimum wage job, and at 16 (or 18), uniess you have unusual skills or are extremely lucky, you're going to get stuck in a minimum wage job, likely with less than full-time hours. Additionally, working full time makes it nearly impossible to go to school and do well, so your academics will likely suffer.

Also, speaking based on some of your other posts, it doesn't sound like your relationship with your boyfriend is the healthiest, as you've talked about his emotional and esteem problems. Moving in with his family would put even more stress on your relationship, not to mention inconveniencing his family. It's an awful lot to ask.

The situation with your mother (again, going back to your earlier posts) sounds complicated, and further complicated by the fact that she is apparently willing to simply lie or otherwise deny her own behaviors. It does sound like she's got some serious emotional issues, and likely, if an evaluation were done, she'd be unlikely to be able to hide that if a competent social worker or therapist evaluated the two of you and your living situation. From what you describe, it sounds unhealthy, but probably not reaching into the realm of actually abusive, so it seems unlikely you'd get much help from CPS.

Which leaves... talking with her about the problem. This involves a lot of effort on your part, and a lot of emotional strength, but don't for a minute think that any of the other solutions you're thinking about are any easier or more practical. They're not.

You do hold the cards to a certain extent; your mom is clingy and your relationship is enmeshed in a very unhealthy way, and what she wants more than anything is you. So you can use what she wants to establish clear, healthy boundaries for yourself. It means a *lot* of arguments, her pulling every possible stop out to make you feel like crap, call you ungrateful and every other name in the book; this always happens when people with no boundaries have boundaries imposed on them.

Basically, you sit and come up with reasonable boundaries. You want to be left alone, be able to go out so many hours a week, do whatever. In exchange, you agree to help reasonably around the house, spend 1 or 2 nights a week with her, and so forth. And maybe, in the deal, encourage her to go to therapy and offer to go yourself, perhaps with her, to some sessions for the both of you.

She probably won't want to agree to any of that, but if you basically say "We can start to redefine this relationship in a healthy way, or you can continue as it is, but if you do that, it will continue to deteriorate, so that as soon as I possibly can, I will move out, and that will likely be the end of our relationship, at least for a long while. I don't want that, and you don't either, so let's discuss a reasonable middle ground. If we can't come to terms, then we should see a therapist to help us with it."

She'll rebel, object, threaten... but if you're calm, reasonable, don't give in to any of her emotional manipulations, and remember that she's going to use every trick she can... and don't let them get to you... in time, you can make a pretty dramatic improvement in the situation, because at the end of the day, she doesn't want to alienate you, and has to realize that if she continues as she is, that she will.

I hope that helps.