Employment Situation Worsens for Younger Teens

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics continued playing catch up with shutdown delayed employment statistics. The BLS has released its employment situation data through November 2025. While that gets them fully caught up, it also means they only reported the data they collected for November 2025 because they didn’t collect any data for October.

The bad news is the employment situation for U.S. teens declined after its September 2025 rebound. That pain was highly concentrated among younger teens (Age 16 and 17), which saw their numbers in the workforce drop by 179,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1,936,000 in November 2025. This is similar to how this part of the teen job scene looked in May 2025.

By contrast, the number of older teens dipped by just 2,000 over the same two-month period, with 3,472,000 counted as having jobs in November 2025.

The following chart shows these changes along with the seasonally-adjusted total Age 16-19 employment level:

In this chart, the number of employed Age 16-17 teens and Age 18-19 teens doesn’t add up to the combined Age 16-19 figure. That’s because each demographic gets its own seasonal adjustment. If you want numbers that do add up within a small margin of error, you’ll want to access the BLS’ nonseasonally adjusted employment figures.

Sharp-eyed readers will also note the chart is showing an estimate for each teen population group for October 2025. These figures are simply the average (or midpoint) of the recorded employment levels for September and November 2025, which we think are reasonable estimates of what would have been recorded for October 2025 had the household employment survey been performed. This survey is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, which was also shuttered by the shutdown because its funding was not authorized by the U.S. Congress.

Overall, November’s teen employment figures are within the range they have been during 2025.

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 16 December 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’. With the jobs number for younger teens being similar to May 2025′s figures, we’re re-using our cartoon from that month since it’s on point.