Scooping ice cream, lifeguarding swimming pools, and restocking retail stores during the summer has long been teenagers’ rite of passage. For most, it’s the first time they build real-world skills and earn their own pocket change. But now, teens are up against the worst summer job market since the Great Recession. Landing a job at the back of a mom-and-pop shop feels almost as hard as scoring a full-time corporate role.
“I didn’t know it was going to be this hard. I thought it was going to be quite easy. And with all the applications I sent through, I feel a bit discouraged,” Simon Chow, a 17-year-old who spent months applying to dozens of summer gigs, tells Fortune. “I’m looking everywhere, and I’ll take anything at this point.”
Around 790,000 jobs in May, June, and July of this year opened up for teenagers—down from around 801,000 gigs from 2025—according to a recent report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And if the study’s prediction plays out, this stretch of summer would mark the lowest teen hiring since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking the data. Beyond the previous year, the only other time this figure dropped to a low this concerning was in 2010 (960,000), when the U.S. was reeling from the Great Recession.
