Despite the federal government's spring mini-budget touting economic resilience, a new study reveals that youth unemployment in Canada has skyrocketed from 10% in 2022 to 13.8% in 2025. This marks the largest three-year increase on record when the economy was not in a recession.
Record Number of Jobless Youth
The report by the Fraser Institute indicates that in 2025, 437,000 young people aged 15 to 24 searched for work but could not find any, a 57% jump from 290,000 in 2022. Additionally, unemployed youths experienced the longest period of joblessness since data collection began in 1976.
Philip Cross, author of The Extraordinary Increase of Youth Unemployment in Canada, stated: "Canada's youth unemployment is a crisis and will have serious consequences in later years when youths today who are unable to secure work try to find steady employment as adults."
Reversing a Decades-Long Trend
The study, published by the fiscally conservative think tank, reports that the increase reverses a decades-long gradual downward trend. The gap between the Canadian youth unemployment rate (13.8%) and the adult rate (5.7%) reached a near all-time high of 8.1 percentage points in 2025, second only to the 9.6-point gap during the 1982 recession.
For 15-to-19-year-olds, the unemployment rate hit 19.5%, a near-record high outside of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The gap between this age group and 20-to-24-year-olds (10.9%) was also at a near all-time high of 8.6 percentage points.
Comparison with the United States
Canada's youth unemployment rate has consistently exceeded that of the United States since 2015. In 2025, Canada's rate of 13.8% was 3.8 percentage points above the U.S. rate of 10%, the largest gap outside of the COVID pandemic and the 1990s, when the U.S. rate fell below 10%.
Sectors Most Affected
Job losses in the youth employment sector were concentrated in retail trade, accommodation, and food services, which account for 70% of youth jobs.
Policy Factors Behind the Rise
The study attributes the dramatic rise to both federal and provincial policies, particularly the previous Justin Trudeau government's decision to dramatically increase immigration, which boosted the supply of young workers, and the simultaneous increase in minimum wages in most provinces, which reduced demand.
Cross concluded: "The extraordinary surge in youth unemployment in Canada is a homegrown problem, and policymakers in Ottawa and in provincial legislatures should review the policies that are making it worse." Statistics Canada's latest data shows the youth unemployment rate stood at 13.8% in March.
