What demographic group had the biggest gains in the U.S. job market during 2024?

The answer is both really surprising and surprisingly narrow. The raw number of older teens, Age 18-19, saw their numbers among the employed grow by 322,000 in 2024, increasing from 3,308,000 in December 2023 to 3,630,000 in December 2024.

By comparison, the numbers for every other age group is much less impressive. The number of Americans Age 16-17 along with Americans Age 20 and older rose by 219,000, with the total number of working Americans in this age group increasing from 157,446,000 to 157,665,000. Overall, older teens accounted for about 60% of the net increase of 540,000 in employed Americans during 2024, with the total count of working Americans Age 16 and older coming in at 161,294,000.

The following chart shows these net changes for each of these demographic groupings, which have not been adjusted to account for seasonality.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Adjusted for seasonality, the numbers become a little different. Instead of 3,630,000, the number of employed Americans Age 18-19 in December 2024 bumps up to 3,762,000. Meanwhile, after adjusting for seasonality, the total number of working Americans Age 16 and older is bumped up from 161,294,000 to 161,661,000.

Compared to November 2024, both figures are higher. The number of older teens with jobs increased 132,000 month-over-month, while the total number of all other working Americans increased by 478,000. Which is to say older teens accounted for somewhere in the ballpark of 28% of the increase in jobs recorded between November and December 2024. Or would, if the seasonal adjusted data could be added together the way jobs data that hasn't been adjusted for seasonality can be. Still, this data is enough to suggest how narrow the job gains have been in the U.S. economy, with so many jobs being added within a demographic group that accounts for just 3% of the total population of Americans Age 16 and higher.

It's even more remarkable when you consider the impact the release of the December 2024 jobs had upon markets. Treasury yields jumped after the jobs report "smashed expectations". The U.S. stock market "wavered" because the "robust" jobs data put investors' expectations for rate cuts during 2025 "on ice".

Would any of that have happened if investors knew how concentrated the reported job gains really were by age group within the working-age population? Since this employment data is collected by surveys of American households, the employment data could be like the political polls of 2024 in being based on a sample that's not fully representative of the population as a whole. How far off is the real number of employed 18 and 19 year-olds in the U.S.?

Most surveys see statistical variation from their sampling, so really the best measure is to consider the trends over time, where the data generally reverts back toward the mean. The next chart presents the seasonally-adjusted employment data for teens Age 16-19 from January 2016 through December 2024, showing the number employed and the employment-to-population ratio, which also breaks out the data for younger teens Age 16-17 and older teens Age 18-19.

(Click on image to enlarge)

December 2024 was an okay month for younger teens who have otherwise been on an extended downward trend for employment, but an outstanding month for older teens. Outstanding enough apparently to affect expectations for how interest rates in the U.S. will be set during 2025 and by extension, the outlook for the entire U.S. economy.

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