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Even if you’re only making a couple bucks an hour working at a summer camp or stocking shelves at the grocery store, the first job in one’s career can feel life-changing.
But many teens today are missing out on that experience.
While the overall unemployment rate has hovered between 4% and 4.2% since May 2024, joblessness for teenagers aged 16 to 19 rose from 12.3% in June 2024 to 14.4% in June 2025—a 17% increase overall. Teens currently are the age group with the highest unemployment rate. Meanwhile, unemployment for people aged 20 to 24, who have also experienced difficulty finding employment this year, increased 9% year over year to 8.2%
Rising teen unemployment primarily relates to the fact that employers have made fewer hires overall after peaking in early 2022 during the “Great Resignation,” especially in sectors where teenagers are most likely to find jobs, such as leisure and hospitality and retail trade. As such, hiring for this age group will be weaker this year.
Predictions from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas suggest teenagers will gain 1 million jobs from May through July 2025, down from the 1.1 million gained during the same period last year (which was 200,000 lower than the firm originally predicted).
“They’ve really seen the most deterioration, which historically is what you would expect during times where things are slowing down [and] unemployment is going up. It’s always concentrated among that 16-to-19 range, and part of it just has to do a lot with where they work,” Kory Kantenga, head of economics for the Americas at LinkedIn, told HR Brew.
And, as older workers experience difficulties finding employment, they could be applying to jobs with lower barriers to entry, including those that are often occupied by teenagers, creating more competition for younger workers, said Nich Tremper, senior economist at Gusto.
Data from Gusto found that hiring rates for teenagers aged 15 to 19 were on track to be consistent with historical rates, though employment growth for this age group is smaller than in past years. Employment for 15- to 19-year-olds grew by just 11.8% in May this year on Gusto’s platform, down from 14.3% in May 2024 and 14.4% in May 2023. At the same time, hiring for college grads is down 16% year over year.
“Teens are, in a lot of ways, feeling some stress finding that seasonal job when folks economy-wide, especially those who are at the entry points of their careers, those who are 20 to 26 are experiencing some of the difficulties in finding a job,” Tremper said. “So some of what might be happening here is this crowding out effect.”
Don’t panic…yet. While the rising unemployment numbers for teens may raise concerns, they are still a far cry from other relatively recent economic crises. By comparison, teen unemployment was at 27.2% in October 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, and at 32.8% in April 2020.
“We are not yet at crisis level for very young workers, but we are at a point where momentum is very clearly shifting in a bad direction for them,” Kantenga said.
Missing out on employment opportunities at the very start of one’s career can bring lifelong consequences. Young people who experience joblessness for six months or more can miss out on as much as 90,000 in wages that they will never recoup, a 2013 analysis from the Center for American Progress found. Unemployment during this age can also lead to poor mental health outcomes later in life, and be a factor contributing to whether a young person engages in criminal activities.
“Those first interactions with the labor market are really critical and important,” Kantenga said. “That’s why it makes sense for us to be concerned…even though, overall, the unemployment rate for this particular group is not at a crisis level right now, but it is concerning that there’s less momentum, given we know that the impacts are quite significant over someone’s lifetime.”
Moreover, these young workers will remember how they were treated in the hiring process, and that can lead to long-term consequences for employers, Kantenga noted. While businesses currently have more leverage in the labor market as workers experience greater competition for open roles, that could change in the future and come back to bite employers.
“The question is…Is there potentially long-term damage you did when you had the leverage, that you won’t necessarily be able to make up for? I think that’s probably something that if you’re in talent, particularly talent acquisition, you have to figure out what that trade-off is going to be,” Kantenga said.
For HR leaders, teens present an opportunity to invest in highly moldable talent while also benefitting from lower labor costs—something that employers have continually cited as a challenge.
“This is a way that you are able to support your business and support folks as they’re establishing their careers and establishing ways to work in ways that might be cost effective for your business,” Tremper said.