WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States has the largest gap of any country in job market perceptions between younger and older adults, with the former feeling much less positive. In 2025, 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally, 21 percentage points lower than for Americans aged 55 and older.
It is rare for younger adults to be significantly less positive about local job conditions than the oldest age group. In only five other places — China, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Norway — does this pattern hold, in which younger adults lag by at least 10 points.
Globally, a median of 48% of adults aged 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job locally in 2025, compared with 38% of adults aged 55 and older, a gap of 10 points in the other direction.
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Younger Americans ranked 87th out of 141 countries for the percentage of younger adults saying it was a good time to find a job last year. While young adults were less optimistic in several other high-income countries, including New Zealand (22% good time), Canada (25%), and South Korea (28%), older adults’ and younger adults’ views of their local job markets in these countries are similar, so there is no meaningful generational divide.
What makes the U.S. unusual is not the lack of positivity among young people itself, but that Americans aged 55 and older, many of them no longer in the workforce, remain relatively upbeat — even as young adults have soured.
U.S. Youth Negativity Over Local Job Market Is Recent Trend
This relative negativity among younger American adults is a new phenomenon and reverses a long-standing trend in which they were more optimistic than older adults.
Younger Americans first fell behind older Americans in job market optimism in 2024, as their belief that it is a good time to find a job plunged 15 points to 55%. That continued in 2025, with a 12-point decline to the current 43%.
Overall, since 2023, younger Americans’ job market optimism has declined by 27 points, similar to the decline between 2007 and 2009 near the time of the global financial crash (33 points), albeit from a higher baseline. Those aged 35 to 54 have seen a decline of 15 points over the past two years, compared with six points among those aged 55 and older.
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These trends from the Gallup World Poll mirror the results from Gallup’s U.S. workforce study, which is conducted quarterly. Though the workforce survey asks a slightly different question — about whether it’s now a good time to find a quality job — the trend is similar, with a significant decline between 2022 and 2025 in employee optimism about the job market, particularly among younger workers.
Youth optimism about the U.S. job market has fallen sharply in 2024 and 2025, even as the worst of the pandemic disruptions and inflation have receded. While optimism has sunk among all youth demographics, the biggest declines have been among young women, the most educated and those not already working full-time for an employer. Young graduates who haven’t yet found full-time jobs are most pessimistic. This may partly reflect anxiety about automation and artificial intelligence displacing entry-level roles, though the data do not measure this directly.
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Young People Remain More Optimistic About Job Markets Across OECD
Other advanced economies have not seen the same pattern as the U.S. in recent years. Job market optimism has dipped since 2023 among all three groups across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, but adults aged 15 to 34 (51%) and 35 to 54 (50%) remain more positive, on average, than those 55 and older (42%).
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Longer term, local job market perceptions across the OECD have followed a trend similar to the U.S. trend: dipping around the financial crash, slowly recovering over the next decade, then seeing a sharp drop and rebound during and after the pandemic. However, unlike youth in the U.S., whose job market confidence has continued to decline since 2022, the optimism of OECD youth about job prospects has remained solid.
Last year was the first on record, aside from 2020, when U.S. youth positivity about the local job market sank below the median for other advanced economies.
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By contrast, U.S. adults aged 35-54 and 55+ remain more positive about the job market where they live than do adults of the same age ranges across the OECD.
Bottom Line
Young Americans’ pessimism about the job market is not unprecedented in absolute terms — they were more negative about it in the early 2010s than they are today. But dropping below older Americans in job optimism is relatively new, and the extent of the deficit is globally unique. Most notably, it stands in contrast to the pattern by which younger adults still lead older adults in job optimism in most other advanced economies.
Against the backdrop of rapid AI adoption across the U.S. workforce, the steepest pessimism is concentrated among highly educated young Americans not yet working full-time, the group most actively trying to enter the labor market.
For more details about the views of the U.S. and global workforce, see Gallup’s recently launched State of the Global Workplace Report here.
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For complete methodology and specific survey dates, please review Gallup’s Country Data Set details. Learn more about how the Gallup World Poll works.
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