Record employment rate: youth, seniors, and what it hides

In 2025, 69.3% of people aged 15 to 64 are in employment in France, according to the Labour Force Survey of the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE). It is the highest level of the series, which starts in 1981 at 65.4%. In the second quarter of 2026, the rate is 69.0%.

A record calls for two questions. Where does it come from — which age group drove the rise? And what does it not say — how many hours, what kind of jobs, what share of the working-age population remains outside the market?

The employment rate of all 15-64 year-olds traces a very flat U: 65.4% in 1981, a trough at 60.8% in 1994, 63.6% in 2000, then fifteen almost motionless years around sixty-four per cent until 2015 (64.6%). The rise is concentrated in the last decade: 4.7 points gained between 2015 and 2025, 3.1 points of them since 2019.

The employment rate of 55-64 year-olds did something entirely different. It falls from 47.0% in 1981 to 29.7% in 1998 — the era of early-retirement schemes — then rises almost without interruption: 38.2% in 2003, 41.0% in 2010, 53.6% in 2018, 61.7% in 2025. That is 23.5 points gained in twenty-two years: by far the widest movement in the whole survey.

The employment rate of 15-24 year-olds, for its part, fell for a long time — from 45.8% in 1981 to 27.6% in 1997, as studies lengthened — then stabilised around thirty per cent for twenty years. It has been rising since 2020: 28.8% in 2020, 34.6% in 2022, 34.5% in 2025.

Two recent movements explain the record. The first is senior employment, which gains 7.2 points between 2019 and 2025 in the wake of pension reforms: every rise in the retirement age keeps one more cohort in work. The second is youth employment, which jumps by 5.8 points in two years between 2020 and 2022 — the fastest pace in the series for this age group — as hiring subsidies for apprentices are generalised.

The overall rate gains 3.1 points over the same period — less than each of the two ends of the age pyramid. That is consistent with a 25-54 employment rate that moved little; that group is not served here, and this reading remains a deduction, not a measurement.

The employment rate and unemployment are not two sides of the same coin. The number of unemployed in the sense of the International Labour Organization (ILO) was 2.37 million in 2003 and 2.45 million in 2025, after a peak at 3.08 million in 2015: over twenty-two years it almost returns to its starting point, while the employment rate gains five points. The labour force grew, employment grew more, and unemployment eventually receded without disappearing.

Senior and youth employment do not compete in the data: both rates rise at the same time since 2020. The idea that a senior who stays in a job takes a young person's place is not what these series show — which does not prove it false at the scale of a firm or an occupation.

Pension reforms punctuate the seniors' curve: 2003 (longer contribution period), 2010 (legal age raised from 60 to 62), 2014, then 2023 (legal age moving towards 64). Between 2010 and 2018, the employment rate of 55-64 year-olds gains 12.6 points: the largest rise in the series over such a span, of the same order as the 1980s fall in reverse.

For young people, the event is 2020: the exceptional apprentice hiring subsidy, later extended, coincides with the take-off of the 15-24 employment rate after twenty years of stability. Part of that employment is employment in training, which counts in the rate but not in the same way in output.

In the second quarter of 2026, the employment rate of 15-64 year-olds is 69.0%, that of seniors 62.1%, that of young people 33.8%. The overall rate pauses relative to 2025; the seniors' rate keeps rising.