What demographic group had the worst employment experience in the U.S. job market during 2024?

The answer to that question is younger teens, Age 16 and 17. From January 2024 to January 2025, younger teens saw their numbers among those counted as employed drop by 300,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1,989,000. Over this period, the percentage of working teens dropped from 24.5% to 20.6%, as jobs held by about one out of eight younger teens disappeared.

The 2024 decline is part of a longer-running trend. The share of working teens Age 16-17 peaked at 25.6% of this demographic group's population in December 2022, with 2,357,000 counted as having jobs. The total reduction in the seasonally-adjusted number of employed 16-and-17-year-old Americans is 368,000, or about 15.6%.

The following chart chart presents the seasonally-adjusted employment data for teens Age 16-19 from January 2016 through January 2025, 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.

From January 2024 to January 2025, the seasonally-adjusted overall number of working teens, Age 16-19 rose from 5,710,000 to 5,712,000. That 2,000 net gain was offset as older teens, Age 18-19, saw their numbers among the employed increase by a seasonally adjusted 294,000.

The numbers don't add up because each of these data series is subjected to its own seasonal adjustment. If you want data that does, you'll need to tap the non-seasonally adjusted data series for each of these demographic groups.

That said, the decline in jobs for teens Age 16-17 and the increase in jobs for teens Age 18-19 suggests a lot of working teens "aged" from the younger demographic into the older demographic during 2024, while the number of jobs held by this demographic expanded.

But that doesn't explain why the younger teens who either aged into or remained within the Age 16-17 demographic now have so many fewer jobs. Why are U.S. employers not hiring younger teens in the numbers they were in 2022 and 2023?

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 7 February 2025.

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