TEEN SUMMER JOB HIRING WAS FORECAST TO HIT A RECORD LOW

Teenagers across the U.S. were heading into the summer of 2026 with a job market that had little room for them, and the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas forecast that teens would gain just 790,000 jobs across May, June and July. If that held, it would be the lowest summer teen hiring total since the federal government began tracking it in 1948, with inflation, oil prices and cautious hiring all blamed for the squeeze.

That number was down 1.4% from the 801,000 teen jobs gained in summer 2025, according to Challenger’s May 19, 2026 release. Fortune reported on June 18, 2026 that the number of jobs teens secured had already fallen 25% in summer 2025 from the year before.

The long view was not kind either. Only about one-third of U.S. 16-to-19-year-olds were employed last summer, compared with roughly 60% at the late-1970s peak. Food preparation and serving jobs and sales jobs are where teens most commonly land, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by Fortune.

“The opportunities for workers at the start of the career ladder started to dry up,” said Nicole Bachaud, an economist for ZipRecruiter, who called teens among the labor market’s “most marginalized groups.”

Jaune Little, director of recruiting services at the HR company Insperity, said some entry-level jobs have simply vanished, and teens now compete with more experienced candidates for the rest. “A lot of the entry-level roles that once existed simply do not any longer,” Little said.

Résumés in the car and a 30-second pitch

Jaelyn Chester, a 17-year-old from Lake Mary, Florida, told Fortune she would wait tables, stock shelves, wash dishes or scrub toilets. She is an A+ student, a high school basketball player and an aspiring engineer, and she had put in dozens of applications. “I’m not unemployed because I’m incompetent. I’m unemployed because nobody’s hiring,” she said.

She kept copies of her résumé in her car and memorized a 30-second spiel for walking into a restaurant and asking for a manager. Without work, she worried about gas money, concerts and a college-visit trip to North Carolina with friends.

Max Stephenson, 19, of Little Rock, Arkansas, thought she had applied to somewhere between 50 and 100 jobs. A work-study spot in her college cafeteria dried up when school let out. “Old people say, ‘Just walk in there and give them a firm handshake.’ That doesn’t work so well now,” she said.

Connor Vukelich, who applied everywhere within 30 miles of his home near Vancouver, Washington, ended up working on his parents’ lavender farm. He later launched Poppin’ Jobs, a job-search site for teens and people in their 20s. “There’s all these ‘We’re Hiring’ signs but no one’s actually hiring,” he said.

Demie Njea, 16, of Lexington, Kentucky, began applying at 14 and estimated she sent in more than 100 applications before landing a job at Sonic. When a friend who had just turned 15 started looking, Njea told her, “You’re not going to get it.”

Teens also vented on Reddit and TikTok about phantom postings, managers who ghost applicants and applications that never got a reply. 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, and Indeed ads for summer-camp counselor jobs were down from the year before.

Then Pew ran the numbers

The picture looked a bit brighter once the summer was over. On August 19, 2026, Pew Research Center reported that an average of 6.2 million teens were working in June and July 2026, about 19,500 more than in the same two months of 2025.

Accommodation and food services employed an average of 2 million of them, or 32%, while retail trade employed nearly 1.3 million, or 21%. Older teens did far better than younger ones, with 18- and 19-year-olds much more likely to have summer jobs than 16- and 17-year-olds. Fewer teens overall were actively looking for work.

Pew found that 35.5% of 16-to-19-year-olds held a paying job for at least part of summer 2026, up from 33.8% the summer before. That 2026 figure uses only June and July data, while the 2025 and earlier averages also include August. Pew also noted that more than half of teens worked for at least part of the summer in most summers since 1948.