Teen Jobs Fall in May 2025

After five months of relatively little change, the number of U.S. teens counted as having jobs declined in May 2025.

This change lags behind the negative GDP reported for the U.S. in the first quarter of 2025. The seasonally-adjusted number of employed teens fell by 142,000 (-2.5%) from 5,732,000 to 5,590,000 April 2025.

The decline was experienced by both younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19), with younger teens experiencing a bigger decline. The total number of younger teens declined by 3.1% to a seasonally-adjusted 1,939,000, while the number of older teens fell by 2.0% to 3,646,000.

These declines are occurring before the summer teen hiring season gets underway. Job outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas anticipates fewer teens will find jobs in the upcoming summer:

Outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. predicts teens will gain 1 million jobs in May, June, and July 2025, down from the 1.3 million jobs the firm predicted last year and the 1.1 million teen jobs employers actually added. This would be the lowest number of summer jobs added for teens since 2010, when teens accepted 960,000 new positions in the summer months.

The firm cites socio-political concerns that they anticipate will result in reduced tourism and potentially higher prices from tariffs, which they believe will prompt employers to reduce their summer hiring. They do not cite any factors for why the employment prospects of younger teens would be more negatively affected by these factors than older teens.

The following pair of charts presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through May 2025.

The figures and percentages presented in these charts have each been subjected to their own seasonal adjustment, so the number of employed Americans Age 16-17 and employed Americans Age 18-19 won’t necessarily add up to the indicated number of working Americans Age 16-19. If you want numbers that do add up, you’ll want to access the non-seasonally adjusted data available at the BLS’ data site.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 6 June 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “An editorial cartoon of a high school student who is having trouble finding a job”. We tweaked the image so the Help Wanted sign indicates ‘MUST BE 18 OR OLDER’.