With the holiday season well underway, the following video from 2024 showing how a number of teens engaged in productive activities to help shoppers with gift wrapping services seems a good way to start our analysis of the teen employment situation.

Video Length: 00:02:48

Now, to the main story! The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is slowly releasing the employment situation data that went unreported during the government shutdown fiasco. The data it reported for September 2025, which would have been reported at the beginning of October 2025 if not for a minority of Senators who obstructed a bill to fund the U.S. government's operations, shows that teen employment rebounded strongly in September 2025.

More remarkably, it was mostly led by younger teens, Age 16 and 17, whose seasonally adjusted numbers jumped from their August 2025 low. Older teens also had gains, which were solid, but paled in comparison to the numbers for younger teens.

The following chart captures the unexpected surge:
 

Unfortunately, there is a cloud on the horizon for teen employment. AI technology would appear set to decimate traditional teen employment opportunities in the years ahead:

For American teens, the summer job isn’t what it used to be. By 2030, it may barely exist at all. That’s the urgent finding from high school senior Karissa Tang, who spent the last 18 months researching how artificial intelligence is poised to reshape youth employment across the U.S.

Her work, conducted under the mentorship of UCLA Anderson’s Professor Geis, breaks the debate down to actual numbers that should alarm policymakers and parents alike. According to her analysis, AI will displace over 770,000 teen jobs by the end of the decade, gutting 27% of the most common positions teens hold today....

Tang’s paper, “The Impact of AI on American Teenage Employment by 2030”, tracks ten job categories that make up just over half of all teen employment. Her method connects market forecasts for specific automation and AI-powered tools, such as self-checkout systems or restaurant kiosks, to how many people each system replaces.

Tang identifies cashier jobs as especially vulnerable, with AI-programmed kiosks enabling a 54% decline.

But Tang sees where teens may have advantages over older members of the work force:

While it might be easy to assume AI hits all workers equally, Tang argues that’s a mistake. Teens often perform narrower tasks, have less experience, and earn lower wages, she explains. That makes them especially replaceable, or, in some cases, worth keeping precisely because they cost less.

“The ‘teen advantage’ is that they cost less,” Tang notes. “So for companies who are looking at AI to help cut costs, they may choose to lay off a higher proportion of older workers.”

It could be that younger teens may see disproportionate gains in the job market of the future.

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