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".
Labels: demographics, jobs
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