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.
Labels: demographics, jobs
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