It's an odd time of year with the seasonal adjustments for teen jobs. The raw data says the number of working teens between the ages of 16 and 19 declined month-over-month in September 2026. But after seasonal adjustments, the number of U.S. teens counted as being employed rose sharply during the month.

Practically, that means the raw decline that took place between August and September for the number of teens with jobs was much smaller than what the seasonal adjustment predicts, with the result the data is transformed into an increase after the seasonal data adjustment. Here are the non-seasonally adjusted employment numbers for all teens Age 16-19, including the break downs for younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19):

Non-Seasonally Adjusted Employment Data

• Age 16-19: 5,317,000 (Decrease of 427,000)
• Age 16-17: 2,035,000 (Decrease of 27,000)
• Age 18-19: 3,282,000 (Decrease of 400,000)

Now, here's what the teen jobs numbers look like after the Bureau of Labor Statistics' seasonal adjustments for each data series is applied. In reviewing these figures, note that since each demographic group gets its own seasonal adjustment, the numbers for the younger and older teen subgroups may not add up to the number for the combined working teen population.

Seasonally Adjusted Employment Data

• Age 16-19: 5,535,000 (Increase of 162,000)
• Age 16-17: 1,973,000 (Increase of 117,000)
• Age 18-19: 3,556,000 (Increase of 57,000)

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the seasonally adjusted employment data is the large gain shown for the number of working younger teens. It indicates more younger teens effectively stayed on the job from August to September 2026 than would be typical for this month, which accounts for the apparent surge for both younger teens and most of the increase for the combined Age 16-19 population.

The following pair of charts shows the monthly seasonally adjusted data for the working teen demographic from January 2020 through September 2026.

It's too early to tell if that seasonally-adjusted increase might be the start of a reversal of a long-running downward trend for teen employment for younger teens, but we'll learn more next few months as new employment data becomes available.

Image Credit: Help Wanted photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

The long-term downward trend for working teens continued in August 2026. The month saw the overall, seasonally adjusted number of teens Age 16-19 counted as having jobs come in at 5,373,000. While just 7,000 less than in July, that figure is 487,000 below the May 2024 peak.

Breaking the working teen demographic down into younger (Age 16-17) and older (Age 18-19) parts, the number of younger teens with jobs increased month-over-month to a seasonally adjusted 1,856,000, which is 505,000 below its peak from December 2022. Older teens with jobs however saw their seasonally adjusted number decline 95,000 from their level in July to 3,499,000, some 302,000 below their recent February 2025 peak.

Looking at the employed-to-population ratio of the working teen demographics, older teens still come out on top, with 41% of the Age 18-19 population employed, which is down from the December 2025 peak of 45.8%. Younger teens however have a bigger decline from their April 2022 employed-to-population percentage peak of 25.5%, dropping to 20.7% as of August 2026. This latter change is nearly equivalent to going from one in four teens Age 16-17 having jobs in April 2022 to just one in five as of August 2026.

The following pair of charts depicts the rise and fall of teen employment from January 2021 through August 2026.

Each of the data series shown in these charts are subjected to their own seasonal adjustment, which is why the employment numbers for the Age 16-17 portion of the teen population and the Age 18-19 portion won't necessarily add up to the figures indicated for the whole working Age 16-19 population.

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 4 September 2026.

Image Credit: Waitress talking between groups of people sitting at tables in a restaurant photo by Negley Stockman on Unsplash.

Depending on how old they are, U.S. teens are having a very different summer job experience in Summer 2026.

For older teens, Age 18 and 19, the job scene is fairly good. The seasonally adjusted number of teens for this portion of the working teen demographic appears to be fairly steady, if not increasing.

But younger teens, Age 16 and 17, are increasingly finding themselves on the outside of the summer job market. In July 2026, the seasonally adjusted number of younger teens counted as having jobs fell to its lowest level since July 2020. Falling from 1,856,000 in June 2026 to 1,771,000 in July, the decrease continues a long-running downward trend that dates back to January 2023.

In addition, the percentage of younger teens who are employed with respect to the population of 16 and 17-year-olds in the U.S. dropped below 20% for the first time since July 2020 as well. Just 19.7% of Americans Age 16-17 had jobs in July 2026.

The following pair of charts shows the seasonally adjusted employment numbers and employment-to-population percentages for younger teens (Age 16-17), older teens (Age 18-19) and the combined population of working teens (Age 16-19) from January 2021 through July 2026.

July 2026 is also a month in which Americans unexpectedly lost jobs. Among industries that are most likely to employ teens, notable declines were seen in the retail, leisure, and hospitality sectors of the economy.

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 9 August 2026.

Image credit: Crow cabin counselor and camper at best sleepaway camp, Upstate NY by ADKPhoto on Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Deed.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, the national median household income was $85,828 in March 2026. This figure compares with Motio Research's estimate of $88,310 and our estimate of $87,164 for that month.

But when you drill down into smaller regions within the U.S., such as the metropolitan areas surrounding the nation's largest cities, the median household income for each can vary quite a lot from the figure that applies for the national population. Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith dug into the median household income data for the fifty largest metropolitan areas to create the following infographic:

By definition, median household income is the amount of total money income earned by a household that falls in the exact middle of a given population's income spectrum. Half of the households within that population will have a higher income, half will have a lower income.

With that definition in mind, the three metropolitan areas with the highest median household incomes are:

• San Jose, California: $175,491
• San Francisco, California: $141,277
• Washington, DC: $130,587

The three major metropolitan areas with the lowest median household incomes are:

• Buffalo, New York: $74,258
• Memphis, Tennessee: $70,056
• New Orleans, Louisiana: $65,021

San Jose is the only major metropolitan area of the U.S. with a median household income that is double the U.S. national median household income.

If you're a World Cup fan reading this article from outside the U.S. and wonder how your nation's median household income compares to those in the U.S., you might try using this tool or others similar to it to convert the U.S. median household incomes by city into your national currency after adjusting for their relative purchasing power. For example, the gross "equivalised" median household income in the United Kingdom in 2023/24 for all households was £44,300 (see Table 20a in this spreadsheet from the UK's Office of National Statistics), which would convert to about $61,357 in U.S. dollars in 2026 and puts the UK's median household income below that of New Orleans.

Image credit: Mapped: How Household Income Varies Across Major U.S. Metros by Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith. Visual Capitalist. 10 June 2026.

The earliest data for 2026's summer jobs season came in trending downward for U.S. teens.

Overall, a seasonally-adjusted 5,350,000 Americans Age 16 through 19 were counted as having jobs in May 2026, falling 29,000 from April 2026's total.

Breaking down the jobs numbers between younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19) finds a split in how each group is faring going into summer. Younger teens saw their seasonally-adjusted numbers plunge by 79,000 to 1,850,000, while older teens saw their numbers rise by 14,000 to 3,510,000.

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

Sharp-eyed readers will recognize the number of employed Age 16-17 teens and Age 18-19 teens does not 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' raw, non-seasonally adjusted employment figures.

We did that and found something pretty remarkable. Here's how the numbers changed from April to May 2026 for both younger and older teens:

• Younger teens (Age 16-17): Decrease of 27,000 to 1,744,000.
• Older teens (Age 18-19): Increase of 107,000 to 3,528,000.

At this time of year, the BLS' seasonal adjustment is designed to account for the summer surge in teen employment levels. The seasonally adjusted data shows employers hiring older teens at rates similar to slightly higher than what they have in recent years. But the data also shows employers are not hiring anywhere near as many younger teens as would be expected from the summer seasonal pattern for this age group.

Media reports have noted that the summer job season for teens is among the toughest on record, but have missed this vital difference. The following excerpt from one of the reports tries to explain why that is:

Challenger, Gray & Christmas suspect that AI and automation, older workers staying in jobs longer, and overall economic uncertainty due to things like inflation and oil prices could be culprits.

The rise of AI means some entry-level jobs are being replaced. Some people are even getting more comfortable with AI customer service agents....

But it’s not just AI that teens have to compete with. Older workers are often competing for the same part-time or seasonal rules as teens. Adults, though, have more experience and more time availability throughout the year. According to a report from the Society for Human Resource Management, on average, nearly one in five people ages 65 and older participated in the labor force as of April 2025.

To top it all off, persistent inflation and high oil prices are making costs higher for restaurants and retailers — places that you teens might typically get a summer job — leaving less room in the budget for summer hires.

Let's take Challenger, Gray & Christmas' thinking apart. If AI were the culprit, it would be affecting jobs for all teens, not just those affecting younger teens.

Ditto for job competition from "geezers" (aka "Americans Age 65 or older). While older teens might have more job experience than younger teens, they would still be at a great competitive disadvantage if geezers were coming for teen job, lacking the education, experience, and long lifetime accumulation of skills and training that this demographic has.

That leaves the "inflation and high oil prices" explanation as the only one of Challenger, Gray & Christmas' hypotheses that would have any impact on the employers who might otherwise seek to hire younger teens.

For all practical purposes, these factors should also negatively affect the hiring of older teens, but that's where the small advantage this demographic has over their less educated, less experienced, and less skilled competition comes into play. We think it's much more likely employers are favoring older teens over younger ones for the jobs they have available, which is why older teens are doing better than younger teens in getting jobs so far this summer.

Will that dynamic continue as summer hiring fully ramps up? Only time and new data will tell, and unlike Challenger, Gray & Christmas, we drill down into the teen jobs numbers far enough to rule out hypotheses that don't hold water.

We'll even do it for our own hypotheses. We don't get to do it often, but our favorite way to start an article is with the words "we were wrong". You'll just need to keep tuning in to see if and when we do!...

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 5 June 2026.

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.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest jobs data, the number of employed Americans fell by a seasonally-adjusted 64,000 since February, dropping to 162,848,000 in March 2026.

Normally, that situation wouldn't bode well for U.S. teens, but the same employment situation report indicates the number of Age 16 to 19-year-olds counted as having jobs rose by 68,000 from February to March.

Both younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19) saw gains. The number of younger teens increased by 37,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 2,000,000 and the number of working older teens grew by 41,000 to 3,459,000.

The following pair of charts presents the seasonally-adjusted data for both the number of teens employed in each of these age categories and also the U.S. teen employment-to-population ratio for the period from January 2021 through March 2026.

Since the total number of seasonally-adjusted jobs fell while the number of working teens increased, that means the number of Americans Age 20 or older had to fall. Which it did, dropping 132,000 to a seasonally-adjusted 157,423,000 in March 2026.

Note that for this jobs data, each demographic gets its own seasonal adjustment, which means this data won't necessarily add up to the seasonally adjusted total for the combined population. If you want numbers that do add up, you'll want to extract the non-seasonally adjusted data from the BLS' labor force statistics database.

Overall, the March 2026 employment situation data is a little strange. Perhaps its strangeness is attributable to run-of-the-mill sampling variation, but we'll know if there's something more behind it over the next few months.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 2 April 2026.

Image Credit: The word JOBS in colorful block letters photo by Sasun Bughdaryan on Unsplash.

The ranks of lower and middle class households in the United States is thinning. The reason why is remarkable: more households are earning higher incomes, allowing them to move up into the top ranks of the nation's income spectrum.

You don't have to take our word for it. We've organized the U.S. Census Bureau's inflation adjusted data for household income from 1967 through 2024 into three groups. The first group contains households with annual total money income of $49,999 or less, which represents lower income-earning households. The second group contains households earning between $50,000 and $149,999 to represent middle income-earning households. The third group contains all households earning $150,000 or more.

The following chart confirms the percentage share of lower and middle-class households in the U.S. is shrinking as the percentage of upper-class households increases.

U.S. households earning $150,000 or more in inflation-adjusted constant 2024 U.S. dollars have risen from 4.6% of all households to 26.1% from 1967 through 2024. Middle-ranked households earning between $50,000 and $149,999 has fallen from 52.4% to 43.8% of all U.S. households. The lowest-ranked households earning real incomes of $49,999 or less has plunged from accounting for 43.0% of all U.S. households to just 30.2%.

A similar pattern holds for U.S. families. See more commentary on this phenomenon here and here.

Reference

U.S. Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables: Households. Table H-17. Households by Total Money Income, Race, and Hispanic Origin of Householder. [Excel spreadsheet]. 25 August 2025.

Evidence has emerged to support our hypothesis that more robust immigration enforcement is a significant contributing factor to the increase in median household income in the U.S. since mid-2025.

Updated monthly population estimates were released last month, with the revisions covering the period from March 2020 through November 2025. From March 2020 through June 2021, most estimates were revised upward by very small amounts, but for each month from July 2021 onward, all estimates were revised downward. The magnitude of revisions start out very small, but increase in magnitude as the revisions draw closer the present.

The negative revisions show three notable shifts as they increase in magnitude. The first shift took place after June 2024 as the cumulative size of the negative revisions grew larger than 100,000. The second shift took place in February 2025 as the cumulative negative revisions surpassed 200,000. The third shift clocks from July 2025 with the size of the negative revisions growing from month to month.

The following chart visualizes the "before" and "after" population data for the period from January 2021 through November 2025 and with the newly reported population estimate for December 2025.

The three shifts follow notable political events that would have a potential outsized effect on U.S. immigration. The first shift took place after President Joseph Biden's disastrous debate with then presidential candidate Donald Trump on 28 June 2024, which ultimately led to his withdrawal from the race several weeks later. This event cemented Donald Trump as the likely next U.S. President and since he campaigned strongly against the unrestricted immigration policies of the Biden administration, it would be reasonable for that event to have a small negative effect on immigrant flows into the U.S.

The second shift came after President Donald Trump was sworn into office on 20 January 2026 and began implementing his immigration control agenda. That change saw the negative revisions jump in the early months of the new Trump administration, which slowed going into summer.

The third shift starting from July 2025 is the most notable one and coincides with the period in which the Trump administration introduced its program to incentivize unlawful immigrants to self-deport from the U.S. with a cash payment and free travel to their home countries. This is the immigration-related policy we think had the biggest effect on median household income because it would be especially attractive to immigrants with very low incomes. The removal of large numbers of this portion of the work force would automatically lead to an increase in median household income with the increasing departures of the lowest income earners, which itself tracks from July 2025 onward.

Comparing November 2025's population estimate from the pre-revision level of 343,078,000 to the post-revision level of 342,439,000 underscores the magnitude of the revision as the estimated resident population of the U.S. dropped by 639,000. At the same time, since the previous population estimates were based on a model of population growth that was established during the Biden administration, it works as a counterfactual, or rather, a reasonable estimate of what the U.S. population would have been if not for the significant political events that altered both it and the nation's median household income.

References

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Table 2.6. Personal Income and Its Disposition, Monthly, Personal Income and Outlays, Not Seasonally Adjusted, Monthly, Middle of Month. Population. [Online Database (via Federal Reserve Economic Data)]. 20 February 2026.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "A picture illustrating the concept of a revision to U.S. Census population estimates". We're amazed at how well the result came out, which is remarkable considering how short the prompt was.

U.S. teens seeking jobs are facing an uphill struggle.

Jobs for Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 continued their long downward trend in February 2026.

For younger teens, Age 16 and 17, that downward trend began in April 2022 when the percentage of that age demographic counted as being employed peaked at a seasonally-adjusted 25.6%. Through February 2026, that percentage has dropped to 21.0%.

Older teens, Age 18 and 19, have fared better, with their employment-to-population percentage peaking at 45.8% of their demographic in December 2025. Through February 2026, that statistic has fallen to 41.3%.

The following pair of charts presents the seasonally-adjusted data for both the number of teens employed in each of these age categories and also the U.S. teen employment-to-population ratio for the period from January 2021 through February 2026.

The trend for younger teens is the most concerning. Over the period captured by these charts, many of the teens who were working at Age 16 and 17 in 2022 went on to become the working Age 18 and 19 teens, which helps explain why that demographic had its peak a little over two years later. Meanwhile, the teens who replaced them in the younger demographic are proving to be much less successful in finding jobs.

The recent downtrend for older teens may be developing in part because of the same demographic rollover, with the portion of the teen workforce who first entered the job market in 2022 now aging out into the next higher age category.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 6 March 2026.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon to illustrate the concept of a slowing job market for teenage Americans", which we think is remarkable because Copilot loaded the depicted teen's cart with stereotypes for teen employment options.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its employment situation data through December 2025, resuming their regular reporting schedule after the delays caused by 2025's Senate Democrats' government shutdown fiasco.

The jobs data was mixed for working U.S. teens. Older teens, Age 18-19, saw their numbers among the ranks of the employed rise in December 2025. With a seasonally-adjusted 3,547,000 older teens earning wages, the percentage of the older teen population rebounded to 42.9%.

Unfortunately, younger teens, Age 16-17, saw their numbers fall again, dropping to a seasonally adjusted 1,938,000 and continuing a multi-year, long-running trend. That downward trend is most evident when looking at the share of the younger teen population with jobs. The employment-to-population statistic for this demographic dropped to 20.3%, its lowest level since January 2021's 20.4%.

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

Sharp-eyed readers will catch that the number of employed Age 16-17 teens and Age 18-19 teens doesn't add up to the combined Age 16-19 figures in these charts. That's because each age 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' non-seasonally adjusted employment figures.

Really sharp-eyed readers will also note the seasonally adjusted data presented in the charts doesn't match our last edition in this series. The BLS revised its seasonally adjusted data with the December 2025 employment situation report, with the revisions affecting all previously reported data from January 2021 onward. The revisions do not affect the nonseasonally adjusted data, which remains unchanged from their previously reported figures.

Reference

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 9 January 2026.

Image credit: Jobs - get the facts about occupations poster by Library of Congress. Public domain.

In 2024, the average American household "consumer unit" spent $78,535 on everything. That includes things like housing, transportation, food, personal insurance and pensions, healthcare, entertainment, apparel and services, education, cash contributions, alcoholic beverages, personal care products and services, reading materials, tobacco products and smoking supplies, and whatever miscellaneous consumer products there are that don't fit into any of these categories.

That's according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditures report for 2024, whose publication was twice delayed until 19 December 2025. The report is compiled as part of the Consumer Expenditure Surveys program, which provides insight into what the average American "consumer unit", to use the BLS' term of endearment that roughly corresponds to households, got for all the money they spent in 2024.

That's useful information, which is why the results of the Consumer Expenditures surveys are used to determine the weighting of various consumer spending categories within the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most commonly cited measure of inflation for the U.S. economy.

Because the data is used this way, it's important to track how the composition of consumer spending changes over time. For example, because the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) made health insurance much more costly, changes in the cost of health insurance has a bigger effect on consumer price inflation today than they did before the ACA was passed. Meanwhile, the amount that Americans spend on apparel has declined over time, so changes in apparel prices today have a smaller effect on the consumer price index than what they had back in the early 1980s when the survey began.

The Big Picture

Our first chart presents the average annual amount of consumer expenditures by American "consumer unit" households in each of the 41 years from 1984 through 2024.

These figures represent the nominal, or non-inflation adjusted, total average consumer spending in each year. As you can see, recent years have seen the amount the average American household consumer units spend rise sharply because of the high inflation unleashed during this period. Average household consumer unit expenditures grew from $61,334 in 2020 to $78,535 in 2024.

Growth of Consumer Expenditures by Major Categories

The next chart breaks out that spending into major expenditure categories, such as housing, transportation, food, life insurance & pension savings & Social Security, health insurance & medical expenses, entertainment, charitable contributions, apparel & other products, and education, to put them in order from highest to lowest:

This chart verifies spending is up substantially in nearly every major consumer expenditure category, with housing, transportation, and food seeing the most rapid increases from 2021 through 2024.

Changing Shares of Major Categories of Consumer Expenditures Over Time

The third chart reveals the trends for these categories, showing how their individual share of total average annual consumer expenditures has been changing since 1984.

Our final chart assembles all these categories together to reveal how the overall composition of household consumer unit expenditures has changed from 1984 through 2024. The major categories of consumer spending that have had a falling share of total consumer spending over time are shown in shades of green, those claiming a rising share over time are shown in shades of purple.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Multiyear Tables. [PDF Documents: 1984-1991, 1992-1999, 2000-2005, 2006-2012, 2013-2020. Excel spreadsheet: 2021-2024]. Reference URL: https://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm. 19 December 2025. 

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.

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.

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 3,290,000 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 3,801,000 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 establishment 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".

American teens are facing very rough going in the U.S. job market of June 2025.

More specifically, the employment situation for older U.S. teens Age 18-19 turned for the worse between May and June 2025. Seasonally-adjusted age-based employment data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for June 2025 shows a large decrease in jobs concentrated within the older teen demographic.

Between May and June 2025, the number of 18-19 year-olds counted as having jobs decreased from 3,646,000 to 3,419,000. By comparison, the seasonally-adjusted number of employed teens Age 16-17 saw a small increasing during this period, rising from 1,939,000 to 1,958,000.

Overall, the reduction in the number of working Age 18-19 year-olds pulled the total estimate of employed teens down.

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

The seasonally-adjusted employment data shows teen jobs peaked in February 2025. Since then, total teen employment (Age 16-19) has dropped by over seven percent, falling from 5,792,000 to 5,361,000.

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.

Speaking of which, the non-seasonally-adjusted employment data shows some contradictory trends between May and June 2025:

• Younger teens (Age 16-17) increased by 391,000 from 1,831,000 to 2,222,000.
• Older teens (Age 18-19) increased by 223,000 from 3,661,000 to 3,884,000.
• Total teens (Age 16-19) increased by 615,000 from 5,492,000 to 6,207,000.

But the seasonally-adjusted data signals the Summer 2025 job market for teens is far worse than these numbers would suggest. That's because far fewer teens, especially older teens, have been able to get jobs than would ordinarily be expected based on the historic peak in teen employment that takes place every summer.

In the case of older teens, June 2025's employment numbers are way less would be expected during an average year. The employment outlook for older teens appears to be finally catching down with the more-than-year-long downtrend for younger teens.

If the employment situation data for teens represents an early warning system for the U.S. economy, the falling seasonally-adjusted number of working teens could go a long way to explaining why President Trump has been putting so much pressure on the Federal Reserve to resume cutting interest rates to boost the economy sooner rather than later.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 3 July 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon with an older high school student who is reading a help wanted sign that says 'NOW HIRING AGE 18 20 & UP', with '18' crossed out". The AI couldn't quite get to what we wanted, so we tweaked the result by adding the "20".

The March 2025 employment situation report came in stronger than expected. The report, which had been expected to show 140,000 non-farm jobs added to the U.S. economy, instead reported an increase of 228,000 jobs to 159,398,000.

The portion of the jobs report based on the BLS' monthly household survey, likewise saw increases. The non-seasonally adjusted number of Age 16 or older individuals counted as having jobs increased by 868,000. Of this number, 142,000 (16%, or a little more than 1 out of 6) were teenagers. More remarkably, 114,000 (13%, or a little more than 1 out of 8) were younger teens Age 16 and 17.

That increase is remarkable is because younger teens make up only 1.1% of the 163,412,000 Americans estimated to be employed in the non-seasonally adjusted measure. Because this data is collected through a survey that contacts a sample of U.S. households, there are questions of how accurate the survey is when collecting employment data about this relatively small portion of the U.S. labor force.

After adjusting for seasonality, which smooths out recurring annual variations in the jobs data, the household survey counts a total of 163,508,000 employed people in the U.S. during March 2025. That figure represents an increase of 201,000 from the previous month.

Overall, the seasonally adjusted number of teens Age 16-19 dipped slightly from February 2025's total to 5,786,000. However, the seasonally adjusted number of younger teens Age 16-17 increased by 101,000 to 2,095,000, while the seasonally adjusted number of older teens Age 18-19 declined by 93,000 to 3,708,000.

We track changes in teen employment because these changes can have an outsize impact on the overall jobs numbers. The following chart presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through March 2025.

You'll notice the seasonally adjusted numbers don't quite add up, which is because the employment data for each reported demographic gets its own seasonal adjustment. The nonseasonally adjusted data does add up however, which is why we led with those numbers in this analysis.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 4 April 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "'JOBS FOR TEENS' brochure cover". This is definitely one of those AI images that looks worse and worse the closer you look at it.

In November 2024, the number and percentage of younger teens with jobs in the U.S. fell to its lowest level since March 2021.

The number of U.S. teens Age 16 and 17 with jobs in the U.S. workforce declined to a seasonally-adjusted 1,927,000 in November 2024, some 280,000 below the 2,207,000 young teens recorded with jobs six months earlier. Going back to January 2024, the number of Americans Age 16-17 with jobs has fallen by 365,000.

In percentage terms, from January 2024 to November 2024, the share of the Age 16-17 population in the U.S. with jobs has fallen from 24.6% to 20.7%. The U.S. economy has gone from providing work for one in every four young teens to providing jobs for a little over one in every five young teens.

The following pair of charts shows the trends for the seasonally-adjusted teen employment and the teen employment-to-population figures from January 2016 through November 2024.

These charts show that in the last few months, the number of older teens, Americans Age 18 to 19, have seen their seasonally adjusted numbers in the U.S. workforce increase. That raises a good question - are younger teens simply aging into this older demographic?

That's certainly happening, but focusing on that dynamic misses a big underlying change in the composition of the teen workforce. Younger teens with jobs who are aging out of the Age 16-17 group are not being replaced in the ranks of the employed by younger Americans who are aging into the Age 16-17 group. An increasing share of those newer teens joining the population of working age Americans have not been getting hired in 2024.

Since January 2024, the seasonally adjusted number of young teens with jobs has dropped by 16%. What do you call it when such a large percentage of a population finds itself without a money-paying job?

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 6 December 2024.

Image credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: "An editorial cartoon of a store sign that says 'NOW HIRING' and 'AGE 18+ ONLY'".