Teen employment rebounded in August 2025 after bottoming the preceding month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated there were a seasonally-adjusted 5,342,000 teens between the ages of 16 and 19 working during August, an increase of about one percent from July's total.
That net gain however masks a worsening employment situation for younger teens. Here, the number of 16 and 17-year-olds resumed a long-running downward trend and fell to a seasonally-adjusted 1,911,000, the lowest number of younger teens counted as having jobs since February 2021. Younger teens saw their employment figures peak at 2,357,000 in December 2022. The number of working younger teens has fallen by almost 19% since that peak.
The jobs picture for older teens was considerably brighter in August 2025, with the number of employed 18 and 19-year-olds jumping 3.8% to a seasonally-adjusted 3,415,000. That gain was more than enough to offset the decline for younger teens and produce the overall gain in jobs for the Age 16-19 demographic.
Even so, the job market for older U.S. teens is worse than it was in February 2025, when the number of 18 and 19-year-olds with jobs peaked at 3,801,000. Even with the August 2025 rebound, the seasonally-adjusted number of older teens with jobs has fallen by a little over 10% in the last seven months.
The following pair of charts presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through August 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.
Rollins College student Amit Sewnauth surveyed 96 of his fellow students to report on how they put their summer to work. Because Rollins' student population overlaps a large portion of 18 and 19-year-olds (the classes of 2028 and 2029), we found the following description of the kinds of jobs they worked at during the summer of 2025 to be interesting:
Students listed a variety of job titles such as sales associate, host/hostess, receptionist, camp counselor, camp instructor, swim instructor, assistant teacher, copywriter, valet, deckhand, and bartender.
Of these jobs, we think only "bartender" and perhaps "assistant teacher" fell outside the kind of employment those Rollins College students still in their teens found during the summer. Most states require those serving alcohol to be at least 21 years old, while assistant teacher positions would likely be similar to internships, which would require students to have to have completed related coursework in order to qualify for the position. Such a requirement would effectively block younger college students (Age 18 and 19) from consideration for these jobs and also the other kinds of internships that other Rollins students participated in during the summer.
References
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 1 August 2025.
Image Credit: Young lifeguard on the job beside swimming pool. Image by Tania Dimas from Pixabay.
Labels: demographics, jobs
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