TEEN SUMMER JOBS FORECAST HIT A RECORD LOW OF 790,000
Teen summer jobs were forecast to hit a record low, with just 790,000 projected for May through July.
Fortune reported on June 18, 2026 that teens were running into a tough job market, with only about one-third of U.S. 16-to-19-year-olds employed the previous summer. At the late-1970s peak, the share was about 60%.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas forecast that teens would gain 790,000 jobs across May, June and July, down from 2025. That would be the lowest summer teen-hiring total since tracking began in 1948.
“The opportunities for workers at the start of the career ladder started to dry up,” said Nicole Bachaud, an economist for ZipRecruiter.
Food preparation and serving jobs and sales jobs are where teens most commonly work, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Phantom postings and ghosted applicants
Frustrated teens took to Reddit and TikTok to vent about phantom job postings, managers who ghost applicants and applications that never got a response.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Sundae School Homemade Ice Cream on Cape Cod received hundreds of teen applications for its summer openings, starting in January.
Applications to New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program had already topped the previous year’s record, the paper reported.
Small businesses, restaurants and summer camps are typical sources of seasonal teen jobs. Indeed ads for summer-camp counselor jobs were down from the prior year.
What Pew found next
The picture looked brighter once the summer numbers came in. Pew Research Center found that fewer teens overall were actively seeking work in summer 2026.
An average of 6.2 million teens were working during June and July, slightly more than the same stretch the summer before.
Older teens did far better than younger ones. Pew reported that 18- and 19-year-olds were much more likely to have summer jobs than 16- and 17-year-olds.
Pew also noted that more than half of teens worked for at least part of the summer in most summers since 1948.
Its 2026 figure uses only June and July data. The averages for 2025 and earlier also include August.
On August 19, 2026, Pew reported that 35.5% of U.S. teens ages 16 to 19 had held a paying job for at least part of summer 2026, up from 33.8% the previous summer.
