GENEVA - The International Labour Organization has released its 2026 youth employment report, warning that the post-pandemic recovery in youth labour markets has stalled as unemployment rises and technological change could add further pressure to entry-level work.
The ILO’s Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026: Back to the future says the global unemployment rate for people aged 15 to 24 rose to 12.4 per cent in 2025 from 12.3 per cent in 2023, when it had reached its lowest level in more than two decades. About 67 million young people were unemployed worldwide in 2025.
The deterioration extends beyond unemployment. The share of young people not in employment, education or training, known as the NEET rate, increased to 20 per cent in 2025 from 19.7 per cent in 2023.
That represented about 9 million additional young people and brought the total to just over 257 million. More than two-thirds of young people in NEET status were women.
Youth unemployment increased between 2023 and 2025 in eight of the world’s 11 subregions. The largest increases were recorded in Northern Africa, Northern America and Northern, Southern and Western Europe.
The report also points to an erosion of middle-skilled employment opportunities, including some clerical and administrative occupations that overlap with jobs considered highly exposed to AI. The underlying indicators are available through the ILO’s youth labour statistics.
Using a task-based measure of generative-AI exposure, the ILO estimates that 6.1 per cent of jobs held by people aged 15 to 29, or about 55.8 million jobs, fall into occupational categories with significant or high exposure to AI. Exposure is much higher in high-income countries, at 14.3 per cent, than in low-income countries, at 0.9 per cent.
The ILO cautions that exposure does not mean those jobs will disappear. Labour-market outcomes depend on access to technology, workers’ capabilities and employers’ decisions about automation, retraining and hiring.
In an illustrative scenario in which 10 per cent of the most AI-exposed youth jobs disappeared entirely, about 5.6 million young workers could face unemployment, move into other jobs or leave the labour force.
The outlook remains subdued. The ILO projects the global youth unemployment rate to ease only marginally from 12.4 per cent in 2025 to 12.3 per cent in both 2026 and 2027. It calls for integrated policies combining job creation, education and apprenticeships, employment services, entrepreneurship support, social protection and skills that pair technical competence with social and cognitive capabilities.
Sukti Dasgupta, director of the ILO’s Employment, Skills and Sustainable Enterprises Department, said the aim must be to “get young people back to the future, where pathways once again lead to decent work.”