There Are 7 Million Job Openings But Almost Nobody Under 26 Is Getting Hired

Employers posted 7.27 million open jobs on the last business day of July 2026, the highest reading since May. In the same month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 158,858,000 total nonfarm payrolls, down from 158,881,000 in June, a decline of roughly 23,000 jobs. Employers say they want to hire, but the hiring is not happening. And when Revelio Labs looks at who is missing from the payroll data, the answer is almost entirely one cohort: workers between 22 and 25.

A Frozen Market With a Missing Bottom Rung

Evan Sohn of Revelio Labs told CNBC on September 3 that this is the “lowest hiring that we’ve seen since 2021, the lowest firing that we’ve seen in a long time,” with WARN notices at their lowest of the year. He called it a frozen market. The freeze shows up in the year-over-year math. Payrolls rose about 316,000 in the twelve months through July 2026, against roughly 794,000 in the twelve months before that. The economy is refusing to onboard new workers even as it holds onto the ones already employed.

Sohn’s diagnosis is that AI is removing the first rung of the ladder rather than displacing tenured workers. Companies leaning hardest into AI are hiring senior roles faster than others while junior slots vanish. Computer and mathematics jobs are up 24% year over year, but the postings ask for specialists, not new graduates. Twenty-two to twenty-five year olds, in his phrase, are “getting lost in the shuffle.” The headline unemployment rate of 4.1% in July hides this because the aggregate rate counts people actively looking, not people trying to break in.

Uber Shows How the Machine Works

Uber (NYSE:UBER | UBER Price Prediction) is the case study Wall Street rewarded this week. The company is cutting 3,300 corporate jobs, about 10% of its workforce, and shares climbed on the news. On the Q2 earnings call, CFO commentary was explicit: AI coding tools have hit “near 100% adoption with our engineers” and are producing a “doubling in the code output for engineers.” Management said it had “surgically, in a couple of organizations, cut headcount by about 10% to 20%.” Customer support and marketing were named as the next targets.

The financial picture underneath is strong. Q2 revenue was $14.19 billion, gross bookings hit $58.02 billion, and trailing twelve-month free cash flow topped $10 billion for the first time. And yet the stock at $75.72 is down 6.44% year to date and 17.63% over the past year. Investors are paying for margin expansion, not workforce expansion. That is the model other CEOs are copying.

What to Watch Next

The signal to track is the August payroll release and whether the JOLTS openings figure keeps rising while hiring stays flat. If the gap widens, the Fed will be forced to explain how a 4.1% unemployment rate can coexist with a generation locked out. The gig economy absorbs some of the overflow: Uber served 208 million monthly consumers in Q2 and moves millions of independent drivers through its app. It provides income, if not a career.

Sohn’s advice to twenty-somethings was blunt: get AI certified, or “go where there’s people” and pursue healthcare, nursing, or broadcast news. Translation: learn the tool taking your job, or take a job the tool cannot do yet.

Data Sources

• Revelio Labs on CNBC: Evan Sohn’s characterization of a frozen market and the 22-to-25 cohort being locked out.
• BLS Nonfarm Payrolls series (CES0000000001): July 2026 payroll level and year-over-year comparison.
• JOLTS Job Openings (JTSJOL): 7.27 million openings for July 2026.
• Uber Q2 2026 earnings release and conference call transcript: financial results, AI adoption commentary, and restructuring context.

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