South Africa's Q4:2025 QLFS is out. The headline says unemployment fell. The full picture says something more uncomfortable: more young people are excluded from the economy today than they were a decade ago. This is that story.
Read the AnalysisThe official unemployment rate for 15–24 year olds in Q4:2025. This is the highest of any age group — and it only counts those actively seeking work. Include discouraged youth and the real rate is far higher.
The absorption rate. Not "looking for work" — actually working. This is the most honest measure of how well the economy is incorporating young people, and it is devastating.
3.5 million people aged 15–24 are NEET — Not in Employment, Education, or Training. That is 34% of this entire age group. This number grew year-on-year.
3.7 million discouraged work-seekers. They want work. They have simply concluded — rationally — that the labour market has nothing for them. They are invisible in the headline unemployment rate.
Nearly 8 in 10 unemployed people have been out of work for a year or longer. In 2015 it was 66.9%. This is not a jobs crisis. It is a structural exclusion crisis.
The 15–34 unemployment rate was 34.9% in Q4:2015. It is 43.8% today — nearly 9 percentage points higher. A full decade of policy, programmes, and spending has not moved the dial in the right direction.
This cohort faces the most severe exclusion of any age group. The majority are not even in the labour force — their participation rate is just 25.7%. That means three-quarters of 15–24 year olds are not counted in the unemployment figure at all. The absorption rate — the share actually employed — is just 11.1%.
By 25–34, participation rises to 72.9% — most are actively engaging with the labour market. But four in ten are still being turned away. The absorption rate is 44.3% — better, but still well below older cohorts. Many in this group cycle between temporary work and unemployment with no stable foothold.
Up from 34.9% in Q4:2015 — a full 9 percentage points worse over a decade.
Youth unemployment is 21.2 percentage points above older workers — and that gap has widened over 10 years.
Nearly half of all young people aged 15–34 are not in employment, education, or training.
When the official unemployment rate falls, many assume that means the economy is getting better. But that is only true if people are moving from unemployment into jobs. It is not true when they are moving from unemployment into discouragement.
In Q4:2025, the labour force participation rate fell by 0.4 percentage points to 59.3%. That means people left the labour market — they stopped being counted as unemployed. The absorption rate (the share actually employed) fell by 0.1 points to 40.6%. Both measures got worse. The headline improved only because fewer people were counted.
For young people, this dynamic is especially severe. The 15–24 participation rate is just 25.7%. Three-quarters of this age group are not in the labour force count at all. They are in school, caring for family members, or — crucially — have simply given up. Their absence makes the youth unemployment rate appear lower than it actually is.
The 10.7 percentage-point gap between LU1 and LU3 represents 4.6 million people who want work but are not captured in the headline. For advocates and policymakers, this is the number that matters.
These are people who want work but have stopped actively looking — not because they lack ambition, but because they have concluded the market has nothing for them.
Discouragement grew by 233,000 in a single quarter. It accounts for 80.5% of the entire Potential Labour Force.
This is systemic failure, not individual failure.
Black African unemployment (35.3%) is more than four times higher than White unemployment (8.1%). This is not a coincidence of individual choices or cultural differences. It is the direct, measurable, ongoing consequence of apartheid-era spatial planning, differential access to quality schooling, unequal social networks and recruitment systems, and persistent labour market discrimination.
Ten years of data confirm this gap is not closing. The Black African rate has risen from 27.6% to 35.3%. The racial hierarchy of South Africa's labour market remains structurally intact.
When race and age intersect, the disadvantage multiplies. Young Black African women aged 15–24, particularly in rural Eastern Cape and Limpopo, face unemployment rates that almost certainly exceed 70% when discouragement is included. No amount of personal effort can overcome the structural barriers of geography, educational quality, network access, and hiring discrimination simultaneously.
Reject any analysis that explains this through individual behaviour. The 10-year persistence of these gaps is the signature of structural failure — not personal failure.
EC has exceeded the national unemployment average for the entire 10-year period — and shows no sign of convergence. It is heavily rural, has limited private sector activity outside Nelson Mandela Bay's automotive corridor, and relies on social grants and public employment as primary income sources. For young people here, migration to Gauteng or the Western Cape is frequently the only visible path out — but that path is blocked by transport costs, housing access, and destination-city inequality.
In Limpopo, the gap between official unemployment (28.2%) and the full underutilisation rate (LU3: 46.1%) is 17.9 percentage points — the widest in the country. This signals that enormous numbers of working-age people have simply given up searching. You cannot actively look for a job that does not exist within accessible distance. This is not discouragement — it is geography. Policy must reckon with spatial exclusion, not just skills gaps.
Across a full decade — through periods of moderate growth, major policy pivots, COVID disruption, and billions spent on social support and public employment — the fundamental position of young South Africans in the labour market has not improved. It has worsened.
Youth unemployment that persists — and worsens — across a full decade, through multiple economic cycles, governments, and policy frameworks, is not a temporary fluctuation. It is a structural feature of the economy. GDP growth alone will not fix it because the structure of that growth does not connect to the young people who most need entry points.
When 79.7% of unemployed people have been out of work for over a year, the standard tools of job-seeking — keeping CVs updated, networking, reapplying — have already been exhausted. Skills erode. Confidence erodes. Networks thin. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder re-entry becomes. We are creating a generation locked out.
Young people who entered the labour market in 2020–2022 and failed to find work are now in their third or fourth year without stable employment. For many, this coincided with their critical early career years — the window during which networks are built, credentials are tested, and pathways are established. That window may not reopen.
Five things that people say about youth unemployment that the data directly contradicts.
"Unemployment is falling, so things are improving."
"Unemployment fell because people stopped being counted."
In Q4:2025, unemployment fell by 0.5 points — but labour force participation also fell by 0.4 points, and discouragement grew by 233,000. The employment gain was just 44,000 jobs in a quarter when the working-age population grows by ~250,000. Fewer counted unemployed does not mean more people are working.
"Young people don't want to work."
"3.7 million people stopped looking because the market failed them."
Discouraged work-seekers are defined as those who want work but believe none is available. A participation rate of 72.9% for 25–34 year olds shows strong market engagement. NEET youth include caregivers, people with disabilities, and those in areas without accessible employment — not people who have opted out of effort.
"Informal work means entrepreneurship is booming."
"Informal work fell by 293,000 in Q4. Most of it is survivalist, not entrepreneurial."
The QLFS cannot tell us incomes, stability, or growth trajectories of informal workers. Research consistently shows most young informal workers earn below subsistence levels, have no social protection, and cycle between informal work and unemployment in short intervals. This is not entrepreneurship — it is the absence of alternatives.
"Youth unemployment is the same problem for everyone."
"A young White graduate and a young Black African school-leaver in the Eastern Cape face categorically different labour markets."
Graduate unemployment is 10.3%. Matric-holder unemployment is 33.7%. White unemployment is 8.1%. Black African unemployment is 35.3%. Provincial unemployment ranges from 18.1% (WC) to 42.5% (EC). Policy designed for the average young person will serve nobody well.
"Education alone will solve youth unemployment."
"There aren't enough jobs for the skills being produced — at any level."
Graduate unemployment is 10.3% — education helps, but does not protect. Matric-holder unemployment of 33.7% shows that the credential most young people work toward barely helps. Education can improve the quality of labour supply; it cannot, by itself, generate demand. The failure is economic structure, not only education.
The QLFS is the best available regular source of labour market data in South Africa. But honest analysis requires knowing what it misses — and for youth policy, the gaps are significant.
The QLFS counts any hour of paid work as "employment." Two hours of casual piece-rate farm work counts identically to a permanent contract with benefits. For young people cycling between ultra-casual work and unemployment, the official employment number can improve while lived poverty deepens. We have no regular picture of whether young people can actually sustain a livelihood on the work they find.
The QLFS is a snapshot, not a video. It cannot show how many young people moved between employment and unemployment in the past quarter, how long each spell lasted, or how often the same individuals cycle between statuses. Many of the "employed" in one quarter are "unemployed" in the next. Panel data consistently shows churning beneath the apparent stability of aggregate numbers.
Provincial averages hide enormous within-province differences. Johannesburg's labour market and rural Sekhukhune District are categorically different — but the QLFS cannot reliably produce estimates below provincial level. The most severe concentrations of youth unemployment in specific districts and municipalities are invisible in the data.
Young women who are not in employment, education, or training are disproportionately counted as homemakers or carers. Their unpaid care work is economically significant but invisible in employment statistics. The NEET category does not distinguish between someone resting between job searches and someone providing full-time care. These require categorically different policy responses.
The education-to-employment transition. The spatial concentration of exclusion. The racial hierarchy of the labour market. The absence of entry-level job creation in sectors where young people without qualifications can enter. Ten years of data confirm that none of these have been resolved — and several have worsened. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as it was built to work. It needs to be rebuilt.
Construction (+35,000 in Q4) offers apprenticeship-accessible pathways. Community services employment grew — but reflects public spending, not private sector demand. The Western Cape shows that functional institutions and economic diversification can produce better outcomes. Some youth do find more stable footing by their late twenties — but at 39.2% unemployment for 25–34 year olds, that stabilisation arrives too late for too many.
Given that youth unemployment is higher today than a decade ago — despite significant public expenditure on employment programmes — what honest assessment exists of why current approaches are not working? What different approach would produce genuinely different outcomes? The question is not "how do we reduce the unemployment rate?" It is "how do we create conditions where young people can build sustainable livelihoods?"
What happens to NEET youth after they leave public employment programmes — and what interventions are associated with durable transitions into work? How do the spatial, racial, and educational dimensions of exclusion interact, and what programmes address all three simultaneously? What is the income adequacy of the work that young South Africans are actually accessing? And who is accountable for a decade of no progress?
South Africa cannot afford to treat youth unemployment as a problem at the margins of economic policy. It is the central structural challenge of this generation. The Q4:2025 QLFS, read honestly, is an urgent call for a fundamentally different scale of ambition — not for young people, but with them.