The International Labour Organization's newest annual report, Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026: Back to the Future, released on 11 August, confirms what youth job-seekers in much of the world have been feeling for a while: it is getting harder, not easier, to find decent work.
Global youth unemployment rose to 12.4% in 2025 — around 67 million people aged 15 to 24 without a job. That is up from the low reached during the post-pandemic recovery, and the ILO says the increase is not confined to one region: unemployment rose in 105 countries and fell in only 58.
The NEET Number Is the Real Warning Sign
More striking than the unemployment rate is the share of young people not in employment, education, or training — the "NEET" rate. It now stands at roughly 20%, or about 257 million young people globally, up from 19.7% in 2023. Unlike unemployment, NEET status captures people who have stopped looking altogether, which the ILO treats as a sharper measure of exclusion from both the labour market and the education system.
The gap between young men and young women inside that number is stark: the NEET rate for young women sits at 27.4%, compared with 13.1% for young men — a gap largely driven by unpaid care responsibilities and restricted access to the labour market in several regions.
Where It Is Worst — and Where It Is Rising Fastest
The Arab States (26.2%) and Northern Africa (22.6%) recorded the highest youth unemployment rates. But the sharpest year-on-year deterioration was in a region not usually associated with youth job crises: North America, where the rate climbed from 8.3% in 2023 to 9.8% in 2025. Europe sits close to 15%. In lower-income economies, the more common problem is not joblessness but informality — the ILO estimates nearly nine in ten young workers in low and lower-middle income countries hold informal jobs with no contract, benefits, or legal protection.
A New Pressure: AI at the Entry Level
The report flags a newer concern layered on top of the existing crisis: generative AI is landing hardest on exactly the entry-level, administrative, and customer-facing roles that have traditionally given young people their first foothold in the labour market. The ILO estimates around 6.1% of jobs currently held by young workers sit in occupations it classifies as highly exposed to AI-driven automation.
ILO Director-General Gilbert Houngbo put it directly: "a generation that cannot find decent work cannot build its future with confidence." The report calls on governments to modernise public employment services, expand skills programmes aligned to where demand is actually growing, and build "human-centred" AI governance rather than leaving the transition to chance.
For young job-seekers, the practical takeaway is uncomfortable but clear: the entry-level job market is tightening at the same time it is being reshaped by automation — making the routes in that used to be reliable (an internship, a junior admin role, a first customer-service job) less predictable than they were even three years ago.