"Unexpectedly" Strong March 2025 Jobs Report Sees Gains for Teens

The March 2025 employment situation report came in stronger than expected. The report, which had been expected to show 140,000 non-farm jobs added to the U.S. economy, instead reported an increase of 228,000 jobs to 159,398,000.

The portion of the jobs report based on the BLS’ monthly household survey, likewise saw increases. The non-seasonally adjusted number of Age 16 or older individuals counted as having jobs increased by 868,000. Of this number, 142,000 (16%, or a little more than 1 out of 6) were teenagers. More remarkably, 114,000 (13%, or a little more than 1 out of 8) were younger teens Age 16 and 17.

That increase is remarkable is because younger teens make up only 1.1% of the 163,412,000 Americans estimated to be employed in the non-seasonally adjusted measure. Because this data is collected through a survey that contacts a sample of U.S. households, there are questions of how accurate the survey is when collecting employment data about this relatively small portion of the U.S. labor force.

After adjusting for seasonality, which smooths out recurring annual variations in the jobs data, the household survey counts a total of 163,508,000 employed people in the U.S. during March 2025. That figure represents an increase of 201,000 from the previous month.

Overall, the seasonally adjusted number of teens Age 16-19 dipped slightly from February 2025′s total to 5,786,000. However, the seasonally adjusted number of younger teens Age 16-17 increased by 101,000 to 2,095,000, while the seasonally adjusted number of older teens Age 18-19 declined by 93,000 to 3,708,000.

We track changes in teen employment because these changes can have an outsize impact on the overall jobs numbers. The following chart presents seasonally adjusted U.S. teen employment and the teen employed-to-population ratio from January 2021 through March 2025.

You’ll notice the seasonally adjusted numbers don’t quite add up, which is because the employment data for each reported demographic gets its own seasonal adjustment. The nonseasonally adjusted data does add up however, which is why we led with those numbers in this analysis.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Force Statistics (Current Population Survey – CPS). [Online Database]. Accessed: 4 April 2025.

Image Credit: Microsoft Copilot Designer. Prompt: “‘JOBS FOR TEENS’ brochure cover”. This is definitely one of those AI images that looks worse and worse the closer you look at it.