☀ Key Stats
◆ About 257.1 million young people aged 15 to 24 were not in employment, education or training in 2025.
◆ That represented 20.0% of the global youth population, up from 19.7% in 2023.
◆ The number of young people in that position increased by approximately 9 million in two years.
◆ Global youth unemployment reached 12.4%, equivalent to approximately 67.3 million unemployed young people.
◆ Youth unemployment rose while adult unemployment moved in the opposite direction, leaving young people 3.43 times as likely to be unemployed as adults.
◆ Youth unemployment increased between 2023 and 2025 in 8 of 11 global subregions.
◆ More than two-thirds of young people not in employment, education or training were women.
◆ The rate among young women reached 27.4%, more than double the 13.1% rate among young men.
◆ The Arab States recorded the world’s highest youth unemployment rate at 26.2%, followed by Northern Africa at 22.6%.
◆ About 476 million young people were employed in 2025, the highest total since 2013, but the youth employment-to-population ratio slipped to 37.1%.
◆ Across available country data, an average 50.8% of workers aged 15 to 29 were informally employed in 2025 or the nearest available year.
◆ The informal-employment share reached 85.6% in low- and lower-middle-income countries, compared with 11.7% in high-income countries.
◆ The ILO estimates 6.1% of employment among people aged 15 to 29 is in occupations with significant or high exposure to generative AI.
◆ AI exposure reached 14.3% of youth employment in high-income countries, compared with 0.9% in low-income countries.
◆ The number of young people outside employment, education or training is projected to reach approximately 264.5 million by 2027.
Note: The main unemployment, employment and NEET figures refer to people aged 15 to 24. Some job-quality and AI measures in the report use ages 15 to 29 and have different data coverage.
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About 257.1 million young people aged 15 to 24 were not in employment, education or training in 2025, according to a new report from the International Labour Organization.
That was approximately 9 million more than in 2023 and pushed the global rate from 19.7% to 20.0%.
The increase marks a reversal of the improvement recorded after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ILO says weaker job creation, subdued economic growth, geopolitical tensions and rapid technological change are making the transition from education into stable employment more difficult for many young people.
Youth unemployment rose while adult unemployment fell
Global youth unemployment also moved higher.
The unemployment rate among people aged 15 to 24 increased from 12.3% in 2023 to 12.4% in 2025, leaving approximately 67.3 million young people unemployed.
The increase in the rate was small, but it contrasted with what happened among older workers.
The unemployment rate for adults aged 25 and older fell from 3.7% to 3.6% over the same period.
As a result, the ratio of youth to adult unemployment increased from 3.36 to 3.43.
In other words, an economically active young person was more than three times as likely to be unemployed as an adult in 2025.
The deterioration was also unusually widespread.
Youth unemployment increased between 2023 and 2025 in 8 of 11 subregions, according to the ILO.
Northern Africa recorded one of the largest increases, rising 1.8 percentage points to 22.6%.
Northern America increased 1.6 percentage points to 9.8%, while Northern, Southern and Western Europe rose 0.8 points to 15.0%.
The Arab States still had the highest overall youth unemployment rate at 26.2%.
Young women accounted for most of those outside work and education
The global divide was even larger when the ILO examined young people who were neither working nor in education or training.
More than two out of every three young people in that group were women in 2025.
The rate among young women reached 27.4%, compared with 13.1% among young men.
That gap cannot be explained simply by differences in education participation.
The ILO estimates that the shares of young men and women in school or training have moved close to parity, at approximately 43.6% for young men and 42% for young women.
Instead, the report points to a much higher level of labor-market inactivity among young women.
More than nine in 10 young women who were not working or studying were classified as inactive, meaning they were outside the labor force rather than actively searching for a job.
The ILO identifies factors including unpaid care responsibilities, limited access to affordable childcare and restricted access to suitable employment.
The broader employment gap remained substantial.
About 43.3% of young men were employed in 2025, compared with 30.6% of young women.
476 million young people had jobs, but population grew faster
The number of employed young people increased to approximately 476 million in 2025.
That was the highest total since 2013.
But the share of the youth population that was employed slipped to 37.1%, from 37.2% in both 2023 and 2024.
The apparent contradiction reflects population growth.
The global population aged 15 to 24 expanded by nearly 25 million people between 2023 and 2025, and close to 60% of that increase occurred in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Job creation therefore has to grow simply to keep the employment rate from falling.
That demographic pressure is likely to remain important over the coming decade, particularly in developing economies where 1.2 billion young people are expected to reach working age by 2035.
Informal work remains the norm in many lower-income countries
Getting a job also does not necessarily mean gaining access to secure employment.
Using available country-level data, the ILO calculated that an average 50.8% of workers aged 15 to 29 were informally employed in 2025 or the nearest available year.
That was an improvement of 1.2 percentage points from the comparable 2023 period.
But the differences between income groups were extremely large.
The average informal-employment rate among young workers reached 85.6% in low- and lower-middle-income countries.
In high-income countries, it was 11.7%.
Among young people specifically working as employees, 77.5% held informal jobs in low- and lower-middle-income economies, compared with 11.5% in high-income countries.
The ILO defines informal employee jobs as those lacking protections such as a written contract, social-security coverage or entitlements including paid annual or sick leave.
These figures are based on countries with available observations rather than a complete modelled global estimate, so they should not be interpreted as covering every economy equally.
AI exposure is much higher in richer economies
The report also examines how generative AI could affect the jobs held by younger workers.
The ILO estimates that 6.1% of employment among people aged 15 to 29 is concentrated in occupations classified as significantly or highly exposed to generative AI.
That corresponds to approximately 55.8 million jobs out of an estimated 913.8 million jobs held by people in that age group.
Exposure varies sharply by income level.
The share reaches 14.3% in high-income countries, compared with just 0.9% in low-income countries.
Northern, Southern and Western Europe recorded the highest regional exposure at 14.9%, followed by Northern America at 14.3%.
But exposure does not mean a job will disappear.
The measure estimates the extent to which tasks within an occupation could potentially be substituted by AI systems, while actual employment effects depend on technology adoption, worker skills and decisions made by employers.
The ILO therefore uses a scenario rather than a forecast to illustrate the possible scale.
If 10% of AI-exposed youth employment were lost, approximately 5.6 million young workers would need to move to another job, become unemployed or leave the labor force.
The report also points to what it calls “experience inflation” in entry-level hiring.
In the most AI-exposed occupations, it cites evidence showing that more than half of newly appearing skills in entry-level job postings were skills traditionally associated with more experienced workers.
The number outside work and education is projected to keep rising
The ILO expects the global share of young people outside employment, education or training to rise gradually over the next two years.
The rate is projected to increase from 20.0% in 2025 to 20.2% in 2027.
Population growth means the absolute increase would be larger.
The total is projected to rise from 257.1 million to 264.5 million, adding approximately 7.4 million young people in two years.
The ILO does not project an improvement in the NEET rate for any subregion over that period.
Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to account for approximately 45% of the global increase, primarily because its youth population is growing rapidly.
Youth unemployment is projected to remain comparatively stable as a rate, easing slightly to 12.3% in 2027.
But the number of unemployed young people is still projected to increase to approximately 68 million.
✦ Why it matters ✦
The figures show why the youth labor market can appear relatively stable at the headline level while conditions underneath are deteriorating.
A 0.1-percentage-point increase in global youth unemployment sounds small, but it occurred while adult unemployment declined and while the number of young people outside both work and education increased by 9 million.
The distinction between unemployment and being outside employment, education or training is especially important.
An unemployed person is actively looking for work and remains part of the labor force, while someone classified as inactive may have stopped looking altogether.
That makes the 257 million figure a broader measure of economic disengagement than unemployment alone.
Job quality adds another layer.
A low unemployment rate can coexist with widespread informal employment if young people cannot afford to remain without income and instead accept work with limited security or social protection.
That helps explain why Sub-Saharan Africa had the world’s lowest regional youth unemployment rate at 8.4%, even though its NEET rate was higher than the global average at 21.6%.
Technology could complicate the transition further, but the ILO’s AI estimates should not be interpreted as a prediction of mass job losses.
The report instead identifies where occupational tasks are most exposed and uses scenarios to illustrate possible labor-market transitions.
The demographic outlook means the underlying challenge is unlikely to disappear quickly.
Even if rates change only modestly, a growing youth population can produce millions more people competing for employment or remaining outside the labor market.
ⓘ How to read the findings
The ILO defines youth as people aged 15 to 24 for its main global unemployment, employment and NEET indicators.
The unemployment rate measures unemployed people as a share of the labor force, meaning people who are either employed or actively seeking employment.
The NEET rate uses a different denominator.
It measures the share of the entire youth population that is not employed and is also not participating in education or training.
A person can therefore be classified as NEET without being classified as unemployed.
Most headline global and regional estimates in the report come from ILOSTAT modelled estimates produced in November 2025.
Modelled estimates combine available national labor-market observations with statistical methods designed to fill data gaps and create comparable regional and global series.
Some measures in the report use different age groups.
The informal-employment and AI-exposure analyses cited above primarily cover young people aged 15 to 29, while some measures of insecure employment focus on ages 25 to 29.
The informal-employment figure of 50.8% is not a complete global modelled estimate.
It is a simple average based on the latest available country observations, with 105 countries contributing to the latest-year informal-employment calculation.
The AI figures measure occupational exposure to generative AI rather than observed displacement.
The 5.6 million figure comes from an illustrative scenario in which 10% of employment in exposed occupations is lost; it is not the ILO’s forecast of actual job losses.
The projections through 2027 are estimates rather than guaranteed outcomes.
Changes in economic growth, conflicts, population trends, technology adoption and job creation could cause actual results to differ.
