Younger Americans’ confidence in the job market has fallen sharply over the past two years, while older Americans remain more upbeat, according to a new Gallup World Poll. The split is not just a mood swing; it is a map of who gets squeezed by the labor market and who gets to stand back from it. In the United States, 43% of those aged 15-34 said it is “a good time” to find a job in the area where they live, compared with 64% of those aged 55 and over.
Who Gets the Short End
Globally, the median share of younger people who say it is “a good time” to find work in their local job market is 48%, compared with 38% among older people. But the United States is an outlier in the wrong direction: the gap between young and older Americans’ views of the job market is greater than in any other country among the 141 surveyed. The U.S. is one of only five countries where younger people are at least 10 points more pessimistic than older ones, along with China, Hong Kong, Norway, Serbia and the United Arab Emirates.
Younger Americans ranked 87th in job market expectations among the 141 countries surveyed. Gallup’s Benedict Vigers called the trend “an incredibly new phenomenon” and said, “Has this happened in most other advanced economies? The answer is a resounding no.” He said last year was the first time in Gallup’s decades of polling that young Americans were more pessimistic about the job market than their peers in other developed countries.
The share of younger Americans saying it was “a good time” to find a job plunged by 27 percentage points from 2023 to 2025, while older Americans’ views have barely dropped. That collapse in confidence lands hardest on people trying to enter the labor market, not the ones already protected by retirement, homeownership, or the simple fact of being farther from the front line of precarity.
The Labor Market Through Young Eyes
John Della Volpe, a pollster who surveys U.S. youth for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, said young people are often frustrated that prior generations do not understand their current economic challenges. He said, “It’s just another thing that drains their mental health — ‘my parents don’t understand that their pathway at this stage in life that I’m in was so much easier.’”
About 8 in 10 adults under 35 describe the U.S. economy as very or somewhat poor, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April, while only about 6 in 10 adults 55 and older say the same. The numbers track a familiar hierarchy: those with less security see the system more clearly, while those already insulated by age and assets are more likely to report that things are fine enough.
A separate Gallup survey found pessimism about U.S. job prospects emerging at the end of 2024 and continuing into 2025, coinciding with the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term and the rise of artificial intelligence, which many fear will transform the labor market and eliminate many entry-level jobs. The report does not offer relief from the machinery itself, only the fact that the machinery is changing in ways that threaten the people trying to get a foothold.
What the Polls Show About Power
The new poll found the most frustrated groups of young people are those who have not secured a first job yet, college graduates and young women, though the pessimism extends across all subgroups of younger Americans, including men and those who have not attended college. Older Americans are more likely to be retired and not looking for work, and more likely to own their own homes. That difference matters: one group is trying to survive the labor market, while the other is more likely to be sheltered from it.
Day-to-day financial concerns were a key issue in the 2024 election, particularly for younger voters, and Trump improved on his previous performance among this group as he ran on a platform of economic prosperity, fighting inflation and affordability. But recent AP-NORC polling found that about 8 in 10 adults under 35 disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy and the cost of living, compared with about 6 in 10 older adults. The electoral pitch promised relief; the polling shows the gap between that promise and lived reality.
The Gallup World Poll results were based on telephone interviews conducted among approximately 1,000 U.S. adults from June 14 to July 16, 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points for the U.S. sample. Associated Press writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to the report.