Little Change for Teen Jobs in April 2025

The initial report that the United States’ GDP shrank during the first quarter of 2025 puts a different light on jobs data. What do you suppose happened with the employment situation of the most marginal members of the U.S. labor force?

We are referring to teenagers, who when compared with every other demographic, collectively represent the least educated, least skilled, and least experienced portion of the U.S. labor force. Unlike older Americans, teens have an easy out, because most can simply switch from having either a full or part-time job to just being full-time students, without ever being considered unemployed. But because a worker’s knowledge, skills and experience matters when times get tough, with employers choosing the retain employees who have accumulated more of these desirable characteristics, teens are often the first impacted whenever the economy shrinks.

But in the first quarter of 2025, teens did surprisingly well. The seasonally-adjusted total number of employed teens ended the quarter at 5,786,000, about the same as the fourth quarter of 2024 ended. What pulled U.S. economic growth down during 2025-Q1 had little impact on teen employment.

At first glance, April 2025 seems little different. The initial seasonally-adjusted number of working teens Age 16 through 19 dipped by 53,000 (or 0.9%) to 5,733,000, which is a small change that is typical month noise in teen employment.

The following chart presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through April 2025.

Breaking down into the subgroups of younger teens (Age 16-17) and older teens (Age 18-19), we find the seasonally-adjusted number of younger teens with jobs decreased by 93,000 (4.4%) to 2,002,000, while the number of older teens counted as being employed increased by 10,000 (0.3%).

Compared to older teens, younger teens have accumulated less of the positive characteristics that employers find attractive, so this is the part of the labor force we would expect to first see the impact of a negative turn for the U.S. economy. If you look at the trend in employment for 16-17 year-olds, you’ll see it has been on a long downward trend since December 2022.

However the data since October 2024 suggests the employment situation for these most marginal members of the U.S. labor force may be stabilizing. While down month over month, the April 2025 jobs data for younger teens is consistent with how employment has been for this demographic over the past six-to-seven months.

Older teens have a similar pattern, only here, the number of employed has been mostly stable since December 2024 and are at or near the highest level they’ve been over the past four years.

What this data indicates is the factors that resulted in the negative real GDP growth rate recorded in the first quarter of 2025 has not affected employment in the U.S. for the most marginal members of the nation’s labor pool. At least as of this writing, which is why we check in on teen jobs data monthly.

You’ll notice the seasonally adjusted numbers for the subgroups don’t quite add up to the whole, which is because the employment data for each reported demographic gets its own seasonal adjustment. The nonseasonally adjusted data does add up however, so check that out at the BLS’ data site if you want to explore employment numbers that do properly add up.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 2 May 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “An editorial cartoon of a high school student looking at a help wanted sign on a store window”.