Teen Employment Rebounds After Three Months of Declines

September 2024 saw the seasonally-adjusted number of employed teens rise in the U.S. economy after having declined in each of the three previous months. The seasonally-adjusted number of employed teens Age 16-19 increased by 231,000 to 5,624,000.

Most of that increase took place among younger teens Age 16-17, whose numbers increased 159,000 to 2,193,000. Older teens Age 18-19 experienced a much smaller increase, with their totals increasing by 71,000 to 3,398,000.

If you’re following along at home, you’ll notice the numbers for each of these demographic subgroups don’t quite add up to the total for the combined group. That’s because the Bureau of Labor Statistics applies unique seasonal adjustment factors to each of these data series. If you want numbers that do add up, you’ll need to pull the non-seasonally adjusted data for each demographic group. When you do, you’ll find the following for the initial employment estimates for September 2024:

• Age 16-17: 2,217,000 (a decrease of 58,000 from August 2024)
• Age 18-19: 3,141,000 (a decrease of 367,000 from August 2024)
• Age 16-19: 5,357,000 (a decrease of 425,000 from August 2024)

The reported total for the Age 16-19 is 1,000 less than what you would get by adding numbers of employed 16-to-17 year olds to the number of employed 18-to-19 year olds, but that’s attributable to rounding errors resulting from the BLS’ practice of reporting the employment numbers to the nearest thousand.

Although all the changes in the unadjusted employment figures are negative, the seasonally adjusted numbers are all positive because the decline in September 2024′s teen payrolls was smaller than is typical for the regular seasonal pattern for teen employment. Teen employment spikes upward from May through July each year before falling back in August through October as many teens leave the workforce and return to school after their summer break. The seasonal adjustments applied by the BLS take this regular pattern for teen employment into account in smoothing out the seasonal swings in the number of employed teens

The following pair of charts shows the trends for the seasonally-adjusted teen employment and the teen employment-to-population figures from January 2016 through September 2024.

Both charts show that even with the seasonally-adjusted rebound, teen employment levels in September 2024 are well off their peaks from earlier in the year. As rebounds go, it’s welcome but not enough to offset the declines.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 14 September 2024.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “An editorial cartoon of a single high school student looking exhausted on their first day back to school, reminiscing about their summer job”. We think the generated image conveys more boredom at being back in school than it does exhaustion, but that kind of fits the experience a lot of teenagers have.