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.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the seasonally adjusted number of employed Americans Age 16-19 fell by 37,000 to 5,313,000 in June 2026. At the same time, the BLS also reports the number of employed Americans Age 16 or older dropped by 507,000 to 162,265,000.

Drilling down into the employed teen job numbers, younger teens (Age 16-17) saw their seasonally adjusted numbers increase by 6,000 to 1,856,000. That gain was more than offset by the decline in older teens (Age 18-19) that had 46,000 fewer counted as being employed during the month.

Now, here's the thing. Each of these data series gets its own seasonal adjustment. When you look at the non-seasonally adjusted numbers, both younger and older teens saw big gains. The raw number of 16 to 17-year-olds with jobs rose 352,000 up to 2,096,000, while the number of employed 18 to 19-year-olds increased 416,000 to 3,944,000. Altogether, the non-seasonally adjusted number of working teens grew by 769,000 to 6,040,000 in June 2026.

So why is the seasonally adjusted numbers showing such a modest gain for younger teens and a drop for older teens and all teens as a whole? In short, it's because the 2026 summer jobs season is falling far short in putting teens into jobs. At least, with respect to the number of working teens that the BLS' seasonal adjustment projects should have been filled in this first month of Summer 2026 if it is valid.

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 June 2026.

As always, 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 stick with the BLS' raw, non-seasonally adjusted employment figures.

For May 2026's teen jobs numbers, we observed that the number of younger teens trending down but the number of older teens was holding steady, indicating employers are favoring older teens over hiring younger teens. June 2026's numbers suggest that's not necessarily the case, with the number of older teens now catching down to a lower level.

Meanwhile, there's evidence the BLS is falling short in collecting as much survey data as needed to have strong confidence in its jobs estimates. We'll see if that's a monthly fluke in the data or if the data they are collecting represents a valid trend in the months ahead.

Reference

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

Image credit: Help Wanted sign by Egan Snow on Flickr. Creative Commons Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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.

The employment situation for U.S. teens held fairly steady in April 2026. The seasonally adjusted number of employed Americans Age 16-19 was 5,379,000. This total falls within the range of 5,357,000 and 5,425,000 recorded for each month in 2026.

The same pattern holds when looking at the data for younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19). Older teens have seen their numbers range between 3,418,000 and 3,496,000 since January 2026, with the higher figure applying for April 2026. That puts a little under 42% of the Age 18-19 population into the employed category.

Younger teens have seen their numbers within the working portion of the U.S. civilian labor force range between 1,926,000 and 2,000,000, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting a seasonally adjusted total of 1,929,000 for April 2026, with a little under 21% of this age demographic's population counted as having jobs.

For the combined Age 16-19 population, 30.6% were counted as employed after the BLS' seasonal adjustments. The following pair of charts presents these figures and shows the trends for teen employment since January 2021.

That's a good sign since the U.S. is going into the summer hiring season, which large numbers of teens enter into the U.S. labor force each year as their school year ends. The following video gives an idea of what kind of work many teens will be able to find during Summer 2026:

Similar initiatives for local governments to create jobs for teens to support publicly-funded summer programs work is being made in large U.S. cities. These programs are in addition to the regular seasonal employment spikes that take place in the private sector.

Looking at longer term trends, fewer teens can be expected to find work in 2026 than in the first two years following 2020's coronavirus pandemic. In those years, teens benefited for several reasons, including:

• They were much less likely to have health problems than older Americans related to COVID infections, giving them an advantage in the job market.
• Large portions of the teen population had never previously been employed, so were not eligible for COVID stimulus unemployment benefits, which gave many older, but lower income-earning Americans an incentive to stay unemployed until the benefit checks ran out. The effect of this policy was to reduce competition for lower-paying jobs, which opened the door for many teens to enter the labor force.
• The introduction of remote schooling as many schools were sluggish in returning to in-person schooling, which gave many teens more time during the day to pursue gainful employment while attending school "virtually".

There's more to the post-pandemic teen employment boom story than these examples. Regardless, these reasons behind it are still not fully appreciated.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 8 May 2026.

Image credit: Summer jobs sign posted on tree by Andy Oakley on Flickr. Creative Commons Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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.

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 employment situation for U.S. teens was little changed in January 2026.

Overall, the seasonally-adjusted employment of Americans Age 16-19 came in at 5,448,000, which is 38,000 lower than the previous month's figure. The employed-to-population ratio for this demographic correspondingly dipped from 30.8% to 30.6% in January 2026.

Dividing the employment data up between younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19), reveals a mixed outcome. Younger teens saw their numbers among the employed increase by 35,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1,973,000, representing 20.9% of the Age 16-17 population. Older teens meanwhile saw their employment numbers drop by 69,000 to 3,478,000 in January 2026, falling from 42.9% to 41.6% of the nation's population of 18 and 19 year-olds.

The following pair of charts presents the latest data for teen employment in the U.S., covering the period from January 2021 through January 2026.

For the entire Age 16 and older population, the number of people counted as being employed rose from a seasonally adjusted 163,992,000 in December 2025 to 164,520,000 in January 2026. Working teens make up about 3.3% of the total number of employed people in the United States.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 11 February 2026.

Image credit: Wanted ad on OpenClipArt. Public domain image.

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.

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.

With the holiday season well underway, the following video from 2024 showing how a number of teens engaged in productive activities to help shoppers with gift wrapping services seems a good way to start our analysis of the teen employment situation.

Now, to the main story! The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is slowly releasing the employment situation data that went unreported during the government shutdown fiasco. The data it reported for September 2025, which would have been reported at the beginning of October 2025 if not for a minority of Senators who obstructed a bill to fund the U.S. government's operations, shows that teen employment rebounded strongly in September 2025.

More remarkably, it was mostly led by younger teens, Age 16 and 17, whose seasonally adjusted numbers jumped from their August 2025 low. Older teens also had gains, which were solid, but paled in comparison to the numbers for younger teens.

The following chart captures the unexpected surge:

Unfortunately, there is a cloud on the horizon for teen employment. AI technology would appear set to decimate traditional teen employment opportunities in the years ahead:

For American teens, the summer job isn’t what it used to be. By 2030, it may barely exist at all. That’s the urgent finding from high school senior Karissa Tang, who spent the last 18 months researching how artificial intelligence is poised to reshape youth employment across the U.S.

Her work, conducted under the mentorship of UCLA Anderson’s Professor Geis, breaks the debate down to actual numbers that should alarm policymakers and parents alike. According to her analysis, AI will displace over 770,000 teen jobs by the end of the decade, gutting 27% of the most common positions teens hold today....

Tang’s paper, “The Impact of AI on American Teenage Employment by 2030”, tracks ten job categories that make up just over half of all teen employment. Her method connects market forecasts for specific automation and AI-powered tools, such as self-checkout systems or restaurant kiosks, to how many people each system replaces.

Tang identifies cashier jobs as especially vulnerable, with AI-programmed kiosks enabling a 54% decline.

But Tang sees where teens may have advantages over older members of the work force:

While it might be easy to assume AI hits all workers equally, Tang argues that’s a mistake. Teens often perform narrower tasks, have less experience, and earn lower wages, she explains. That makes them especially replaceable, or, in some cases, worth keeping precisely because they cost less.

“The ‘teen advantage’ is that they cost less,” Tang notes. “So for companies who are looking at AI to help cut costs, they may choose to lay off a higher proportion of older workers.”

It could be that younger teens may see disproportionate gains in the job market of the future.

According to Revelio Labs' public labor statistics data, seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment in the U.S. fell by in November 2025. The firm's estimate of nonfarm employment is 159,231,610 for the month, down about 9,000 from its revised estimate of 159,240,592 for October 2025. Compared to November 2024 however, the estimate for November 2025 is up nearly 208,000.

Revelio Labs' data indicates total nonfarm employment peaked in April 2025 at 159,280,995 and has largely been slightly lower to flat in the period since. November 2025's estimate is within 0.03% of that peak.

Meanwhile, the BLS has released employment data through September 2025, putting its initial estimate of seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment at 159,626,000 for the month, which represents a peak in its data series. This value is up 119,000 from the BLS' revised estimate of 159,507,000 for August 2025 and is almost 370,000 higher than Revelio Labs' estimate for September 2025.

Before we go any further, Revelio Labs' appears to have executed a major revision of its historical data, with large negative changes to its oldest data that tapers off to very small downward changes for the most recent months. The following chart captures both the BLS' and Revelio Lab's latest estimates of seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment over the period from January 2022 through November 2025 and all Revelio Labs' estimates released in October, November, and December 2025.

Analyst's Notes

At this writing, Revelio Labs' has not produced any statement to account for its large downward revisions in its oldest data, which are substantial. In our featured chart, the firm's November 2025 estimate for January 2022 was reduced by over 1.6 million from its October 2025 estimate. Even so, the firm's estimate for January 2022 is over 1.9 million higher than the BLS' estimate for the month.

Without an explanation, we caution against using Revelio Labs' historical data in other analyses. We do observe that Revelio Labs' data does generally match the direction of employment changes in the BLS' historical series over the period covered in our chart, so its still likely useful for divining that aspect of how the total nonfarm employment level is changing over time.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates it will next release its employment situation data on Tuesday, 16 December 2025, which will include newly released estimates for both October and November 2025.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 4 December 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 20 November 2025.

Image credit: Big Data by Learntek on Flickr. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Deed. Public Domain.

Revelio Lab's non-government dependent jobs data for October 2025 reports the seasonally-adjusted total nonfarm employment level in the U.S. is 159,238,994. This figure represents a 9,057 net loss in jobs from September 2025.

The firm's detailed employment by sector data indicates the biggest contributor to the net loss in jobs was reduction in the number of government employees compared to the previous month. Overall, for the sixteen sectors tracked by Revelio Labs, nine were negative and seven were positive, with most showing relatively small changes in October 2025. Here are the five sectors that saw the biggest month-over-month changes:

• Government: 23,279,400 (-22,200)
• Retail Trade: 15,410,900 (-8,500)
• Manufacturing: 12,784,400 (-5,200)
• Financial Activities: 9,397,800 (+9,600)
• Education and Health Services: 26,929,800 (+22,000)

We've updated our pair of charts tracking Revelio Lab's seasonally-adjusted nonfarm employment data from January 2022 through October 2025, which we've compared against available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which hasn't reported any jobs data past August 2025 because of the continuing federal government shutdown.

The chart also reveals how Revelio Lab's data was revised over this period with its latest report. We observe the firm's estimates increased by a small amount over the entire period covered by our chart.

We've also indicated the BLS' total nonfarm employment estimates for the period, which are quite different in the period from January 2022 up to January 2025. The BLS' employment estimates have deteriorated in quality in recent years because the size of its sampling of U.S. employers plunged during the 2020's coronavirus pandemic and has not recovered, giving the BLS a much less complete picture of the nation's employment situation than it had before.

With enough Democratic party senators voting to break their party's filibuster against a Republican bill that would fund the U.S. government's operations, an end to the shutdown now appears to be on track. However, we think it will likely be another month before the BLS' employment estimates for the months they missed reporting might become available. After they do become available, we'll do one last recap of the total nonfarm employment data before resuming our series on teen employment trends.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 2 November 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 5 September 2025.

Image credit: Woman Filling Out a Job Application by amtec_photos on Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC by-SA 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Deed.

When the U.S. government shut down on Wednesday, 1 October 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also shut down. Because the BLS shut down, the September 2025 jobs report was put on hold until such a time the Congress passes a bill to fund its operations.

For us, that's a minor inconvenience because we use the BLS' jobs data paired with age demographic data to track the employment situation for U.S. teens. While we'd like to have the latest data, we really don't expect it to show any major changes from when we last covered the teen jobs scene.

For others, the absence of the BLS' jobs data could be a bigger inconvenience. Especially analysts who use the data to divine how institutions like the Federal Reserve might adapt monetary policy because of how the jobs data is changing.

That's why it is a huge mistake to only rely on the BLS for jobs data. Fortunately, the BLS doesn't have a monopoly on what many analysts consider to be the most useful portion of its jobs report: its seasonally adjusted estimates of the total number of jobs being done in the U.S. by the nonfarm workforce.

Private sector firms like Revelio Labs have developed independent estimates of total nonfarm employment in the U.S. economy that doesn't rely on whether the BLS' data jocks have approved funding to do their jobs. Or even if they do it as well as needed, as has come into question in recent years.

Either way, the current shut down makes independently developed estimates especially useful. We tapped Revelio Labs' data for seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment in the U.S. to compare their estimates with those of the BLS in the period from January 2022 through September 2025. Or really, from January 2022 through August 2022 because there is no BLS estimate for September 2025 at this writing. The following pair of charts shows this data and also how it changed from the preceding month:

Revelio Labs' describes what makes their total nonfarm employment estimates different from the BLS' estimates in the press release reporting their initial September 2025 estimate:

RPLS is a freely available macroeconomic labor market set of statistics built from 100+ million U.S. profiles to provide a clear view of workforce dynamics. It follows a format similar to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), tracking employment levels, wages, and job transitions at a scale that traditional surveys cannot, offering a continuous picture of the labor market. RPLS intends to close the growing information gap and deliver unbiased data on the U.S. workforce for policymakers, businesses, and the public....

Powered by a dataset representing close to the whole population of employed people in the United States, Revelio Public Labor Statistics (RPLS) draws from 100+ million U.S. profiles that mirror the national workforce and cover two-thirds of all employed individuals, compared to an estimated 27% from the BLS establishment survey and 0.03% from the BLS household survey.

The quality of the BLS' employment estimates have deteriorated because the size of its sampling of U.S. employers plunged during the 2020's coronavirus pandemic and has not recovered, which gives the BLS a much less complete picture of the nation's employment situation than it had before. Meanwhile, the BLS has used statistical models to try to compensate for that core problem, which have proven to fall wide of the mark in recent years. These problems have led the BLS to miscount total nonfarm employment, which has resulted in the BLS having to issue two major revisions to its estimates in the last 14 months.

All of which has made the BLS' employment situation data less than optimal for policy makers who use it to set their policies. Fortunately, there are alternatives to the BLS' data that can complement it by helping provide a more complete picture of the employment situation in the U.S. Or that can provide a reasonable overall picture when the BLS' jobs numbers aren't available.

Do check out Revelio Labs' total nonfarm employment data and its other data products. They provide a lot more detail than we've covered in this article.

References

Revelio Labs. Total Nonfarm Employment National. [CSV Data]. 2 October 2025.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total Nonfarm Employment. Current Employment Statistics - CES. [Online database]. Last Updated 5 September 2025.

Image credit: Big Data by Learntek on Flickr. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Deed. Public Domain.

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".

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'.