Young, Jobless and Unequal: The Fault Lines Running Through South Africa’s Labour Market

South Africa has strengthened its capacity to turn labour-market data into policy intelligence, but the evidence emerging from that system underscores how difficult the country’s youth employment challenge remains. Employment among people aged 15–34 increased between early 2021 and early 2025, yet unemployment among 15–24-year-olds reached 62.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2025, while young women continued to face higher unemployment than young men.

South Africa's labour market is sending two signals at once. More young people are working than four years ago, but the youngest jobseekers remain locked out of employment at extraordinary rates. By the first quarter of 2025, unemployment among 15–24-year-olds stood at 62.5 per cent, more than double the 29 per cent recorded among adults aged 25 and above.

The Department of Employment and Labour's report, An Examination of the Labour Market Status of Youth and Adults in South Africa based on Labour Market Information System Decent Work Indicators, 2021–2025, shows that South Africa is building a more detailed picture of who participates in the labour market, who finds work and who remains excluded. The policy challenge is whether that sharper diagnosis can now produce more targeted responses.

More Young People Are Working, but the Jobs Divide Remains Severe

Employment among South Africans aged 15–34 rose from approximately 5 million in the first quarter of 2021 to 5.7 million in the first quarter of 2025. Trade accounted for the largest share of youth employment, followed by services and manufacturing, indicating that meaningful numbers of young people have entered or remained connected to economic activity during the period.

However, that improvement does not erase the scale of exclusion elsewhere in the labour market. Young people aged 15–24 consistently experienced higher unemployment than the broader 15–34 youth population, adults and the national working-age population, showing that the transition into employment is particularly difficult for those at the beginning of their working lives.

Employment growth and unemployment can move in ways that tell very different stories about labour-market conditions. An increase in the number of employed young people can coexist with extremely high unemployment if large sections of the youth population continue struggling to secure work, meaning that aggregate gains cannot by themselves answer whether labour-market access is becoming more inclusive.

The figures push the debate beyond a simple question of whether jobs are being created. The more consequential question is who is able to secure those opportunities and which groups remain disconnected from them. In South Africa's case, the data suggests that the youngest workers continue to face a much steeper barrier to labour-market entry than older adults.

Young Women Face an Additional Layer of Labour-Market Exclusion

Age is not the only dividing line. Among young people aged 15–34, female unemployment remained consistently higher than male unemployment throughout the period examined, pointing to persistent gender differences in access to employment and adding another dimension to South Africa's youth jobs challenge.

The significance is that youth unemployment cannot be treated as a single, uniform policy problem. A labour-market intervention designed around the average experience of young people may overlook the different obstacles confronting young women, discouraged work-seekers or those who are not in employment, education or training. The report's age- and sex-based analysis makes those distinctions easier to identify.

This is where stronger labour-market information becomes particularly important. South Africa's Labour Market Information System brings together evidence on employment, labour-force participation, unemployment, labour underutilisation, NEET rates, occupations and economic activity, allowing policymakers to see where vulnerabilities are concentrated rather than relying only on broad national indicators.

Better diagnosis does not automatically solve those inequalities, but it can make poorly targeted policy harder to justify. If the evidence repeatedly shows that certain groups are experiencing substantially worse outcomes, the effectiveness of employment programmes increasingly depends on whether those differences shape programme design, targeting and evaluation.

The Real Shift Is From Collecting Labour Data to Using It

The institutional story behind the figures may prove almost as important as the statistics themselves. South Africa's Labour Market Information System was established through collaboration between the Department of Employment and Labour, Statistics South Africa and the International Labour Organization to strengthen the availability and use of labour-market information for policy formulation.

The latest phase moves that effort from system-building toward institutional use. The ILO supported a national capacity-building process that brought together DEL, Stats SA and other stakeholders, strengthening the department's ability to analyse labour-market data through the Decent Work Framework and convert the results into policy-relevant labour-market intelligence.

Governments rarely suffer from a complete absence of employment data; the harder problem is turning information into decisions. A functioning labour-market information system has limited value if evidence remains disconnected from programme design, while a system embedded in policymaking can help identify which groups need support, where interventions are falling short and which labour-market indicators deserve closer monitoring.

The ownership structure is also notable. The report is owned by the Department of Employment and Labour, validated by Statistics South Africa and supported technically and financially by the ILO, reflecting an effort to strengthen domestic capacity rather than leave labour-market analysis dependent on external institutions.

South Africa Now Has a Clearer Diagnosis

The priorities identified through the analysis include better coordination of Active Labour Market Programmes, stronger support for young people moving from education into employment, targeted responses for discouraged work-seekers and young people not in employment, education or training, and action to address persistent gender inequalities.

The next challenge is translating those priorities into interventions that can be measured against the inequalities identified in the data. The report establishes where important vulnerabilities lie, but the effectiveness of the wider LMIS effort will ultimately depend on whether evidence changes how programmes are coordinated, which groups they target and how their outcomes are assessed over time.

Several indicators will therefore matter in the years ahead. The unemployment trajectory of 15–24-year-olds will show whether the youngest workers are gaining a stronger foothold in the labour market, while the gap between male and female youth unemployment will reveal whether gender disparities are narrowing. Trends among discouraged work-seekers and NEET youth will be equally important in determining whether those furthest from employment are being reached.

South Africa now has a stronger institutional framework for examining those patterns in detail. The more demanding test is whether that intelligence can shape employment policies and programmes strongly enough to change the experience of the young people whose prospects remain weakest, because their ability to enter productive employment will influence the wider trajectory of the national labour market itself.