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.