California has a jobs problem. It’s not only failing to create them, it’s been destroying existing ones. Unemployment sits at 5.5%, the worst among the states. Only in the District of Columbia is the situation more grim. The jobless rate in the nation’s capital is 6%.
This isn’t due to a run of bad luck. It’s the greasy residue of poor public policy that has produced a punishing regulatory regime and demands employers pay wages they can’t afford.
As disturbing as that 5.5% figure is, there’s another unique to California that’s even worse: 21.6%.
That was the jobless rate for teens in the state in July, and it was, again, the highest in the country, and quite close to twice the national average, which was 12.4%. August figures were essentially the same – 21.5% for California and 12.5% nationally.
Meanwhile, the 12-month rolling average of teen unemployment rates in the largest county in the state, Los Angeles, rose from 16.3% in April 2024 to 19.7% in April 2025.
The Employment Policies Institute calls the state’s teen joblessness rate “an alarming reality.”
“This means one in five teens trying to get a job in California this summer were unable to, and unable to gain valuable work experience as a start to their future careers.”
California’s teen jobless rate was only the second highest in the country “earlier this year,” says EPI, trailing Colorado by eight-tenths of a percentage point as recently as April before taking the top spot.
What could have possibly caused that?
Maybe another boost in the state’s minimum wage that arrived on Jan. 1 (with more on the way)? Then a dozen cities hiking their minimum wages on July 1? (The state’s biggest city, Los Angeles, is hoisting its minimum wage for hotel and airport workers to what will eventually be $30 an hour in July 2028.)
Don’t forget, there’s also the $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers across the state that’s been in effect since April 2024.
Teens are hit harder by the negative impacts of minimum-wage hikes than older workers. They often find their first jobs working in fast food, sit-down restaurants and retail stores earning the minimum wage, which they are more than three times as likely to make as those 25 and older. When the wage floor is bumped upward, the youngest employees are the ones to be bounced out the door – or never get the opportunities to work in the first place because jobs have been consumed by government-mandated higher wages.
Given the state and local minimum-wage increases that seem to arrive more regularly than a city bus, one might think that teens are drawn into the workforce by the higher wages. Not so. California teens are “declining to enter the workforce” at rising rates, says EPI.
“Labor force participation (those with a job or looking for a job) among 16 to 19 year olds has plummeted from 30.4%” in July of last year “to just 25.9% of teens trying to join the labor force in July 2025. The rate of labor force participation for California’s teens is significantly below the national average.”
Maybe there are just fewer places for them to work. After eight years of employment growth that exceeded the national average, fast-food jobs fell in California by 2.3% from September 2023 to May of this year while nationally they grew by 1.3%. Remember, that bloated fast-food minimum wage, which killed 18,000 jobs, and was expected to add from $100,000 to $200,000 a year to the annual cost of doing business at each location, became law in April of last year.
It would be no leap to assume that many young people have just given up, and they’re looking forward to the day they leave California, as so many others already have, to relocate in a state where opportunity isn’t squashed by a government that can’t leave anything in the private sector alone.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
