Employment Situation Worsens for Older Teens

The employment situation for older U.S. teens worsened in July 2025.

Seasonally-adjusted data reported in the household survey portion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report for July 2025 counted some 5,291,000 teens Age 18 and 19 as having jobs, which is the lowest figure recorded for this demographic since December 2021. The number of employed teens in this group had peaked at 5,861,000 in May 2024, which then dropped to a low of 5,390,000 in August 2024 before going on to recover to a more recent peak of 5,792,000 in February 2025.

As a percentage of the entire Age 18-19 group, employed teens have gone from a high of 45.9% in December 2024 to just 39.2% of this population in the last seven months. Most of that decline has taken place since February 2025, in which 45.6% of the older teen had been recorded as being employed.

By contrast, the employment situation for younger between Age 16 and 17 has been largely flat through this period. Younger teens have seen their employment prospects dim over an longer period of time, going from a peak of 25.6% of their portion of the U.S. population to 21% in July 2025.

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

The figures and percentages presented in these charts have each been subjected to their own seasonal adjustment by the analysts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 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 in the whole Age 16-19 bracket. If you want numbers that do add up, aside from small rounding errors, you’ll want to access the non-seasonally adjusted data available at the BLS’ data site.

The household survey data which gives demographic insights into the composition of the U.S. labor force was not affected by the negative revisions included in the establishment survey.

The employment data for teens from the household survey however supports the interpretation of the U.S. job market as weakening, which the negative revisions to the establishement survey would appear to have finally caught up to and confirmed.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 1 August 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “An editorial cartoon illustrating that older teenagers are having trouble getting jobs in the US”.