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.