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July typically marks the top of the annual job market for American teenagers. Each year sees the non-seasonally adjusted number of teens with jobs spike during the month with the peak of the summer job season. In 2023 however, after seasonal adjustments are made to account for that annual phenomenon, a different picture is emerging.

Teen jobs fell again in July 2023, continuing a downward trend that's taken hold over the last several months.

For the Age 16-17 subset of the working U.S. teen population, that downtrend started after their seasonally-adjusted employment figures peaked in December 2022. Employment data for older teens, Age 18-19, have been declining since peaking in April 2023.

That's the same as the observed trend for the combined population of working 16-to-19 year olds in the U.S., given the higher percentage of older teens with jobs.

The following double chart shows the seasonally-adjusted data for the employed number of teens and the corresponding employed-to-population ratio for each of these demographic groupings of working U.S. teens from January 2016 through July 2023.

Each of these data series have been subjected to its own seasonal adjustment, which is why simply adding a month's employment data for the Age 16-17 group to the Age 18-19 group won't necessarily add up to the total shown for the combined Age 16-19 population. By contrast, the raw, non-seasonally adjusted data does add up but shows a lot more volatility for the working teen population. The biggest seasonal adjustments for working teens take place during the summer each year.

Based on the currently dimming seasonally-adjusted trends, both the number and share of working U.S. teens are returning to levels last seen in 2021.

Reference

Here's where you can get all the monthly jobs data, seasonally-adjusted or not, for working U.S. teens!

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey - CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 4 August 2023.

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