Gen Z Outpacing Millennials in Careers, New Report Finds

For years the going joke was that Gen Z would be the lost generation at work, buried under student debt and locked out of good jobs. New labor market data documents Gen Z outpacing millennials on the two measures that matter most at the start of a career: how much they earn and how hard it is to find work. The findings come from the Early-Career Labor Market Report from the resume platform Zety, which analyzed U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for ages 20 to 24 across two comparable periods, millennials from 2005 to 2008 and Gen Z from 2021 to 2024. It is the clearest evidence yet of Gen Z outpacing millennials on the measures that define an early career.

The numbers behind the reversal

The headline figures are hard to argue with. Full-time Gen Z workers earned a median of $756 a week after adjusting for inflation, compared with $674 for millennials at the same age, a gap of roughly twelve point three percent. Unemployment averaged 7.5 percent for young Gen Z adults versus 8.9 percent for millennials, a one point four percentage point advantage for the younger generation. Zety's report notes that the comparison isolates each generation during the same early-career window, so the difference is not just an artifact of comparing a boom year to a recession. You can read the full methodology in Zety's Early-Career Labor Market Report.

The same report also documents the stranger half of the picture. Gen Z is less present in the labor force overall. Labor force participation averaged 71.1 percent for Gen Z, compared with 74.5 percent for millennials at the same age. The employment-population ratio shows a similar pattern, 65.8 percent versus 67.9 percent, meaning a smaller share of Gen Z adults held jobs at all. In plain terms, fewer young adults are showing up to the job market, but the ones who do are landing more often and earning more when they arrive, as reported by CPA Practice Advisor.

Why this generation started ahead

Timing explains a lot of the gap. Millennials walked into the workforce just as the financial system seized up at the end of the 2000s, and they spent the following decade fighting through weak wage growth and a long hiring drought. Gen Z entered a much tighter post-pandemic labor market, where employers competed for workers and minimum wages rose steadily. That backdrop lifted pay for young workers across the board, which is why Gen Z outpacing millennials on earnings shows up so clearly in the data.

The pattern is not limited to the United States. A report from the Resolution Foundation found that at the same early-career age, young workers born in the late 1990s earned twelve percent more in real weekly pay than millennials born in the late 1980s, the highest early-career pay of any cohort since the 1950s. The think tank also found that workers in the bottom 10 percent of earners saw their real pay rise 36 percent between 2012 and 2025, driven by minimum wage increases, according to The HR Digest.

Charlie McCurdy, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said in the report: "The living standards stagnation of the millennial generation has been well documented over the past decade. Many have speculated that the breakdown of generational progress has continued for gen Z too. But with the oldest members of gen Z now several years into their working lives, the good news is that they've enjoyed a mini pay rebound."

The caveats behind the good news

Young workers still do not have it easy. Housing costs absorb far more of a starting salary than they did two decades ago, student debt burdens remain heavy, and a big share of Gen Z workers report feeling burned out early. The lower labor force participation rate is itself a warning sign. Some young adults have stopped looking entirely, which drags down participation without touching the unemployment rate. Meanwhile artificial intelligence is already reshaping the entry-level tasks that used to be a young worker's first foothold, a pressure that could reverse some of these gains for the cohorts still to come.

There is also a fulfillment gap that wages cannot close. Polls keep finding that young workers expect more from a job than a paycheck: real paths to advancement and some control over their schedules. That mismatch helps explain why more than half of young workers say they plan to quit in the coming year, even as their earnings outpace every generation before them. Gen Z is winning on the spreadsheet and still shopping around, which may be the most on-brand outcome possible.

Still, the report redraws a storyline that has run for years. Millennials were supposed to be the generation that broke the promise of progress, and Gen Z was supposed to inherit the fallout. The data says the inheritance went the other way, at least on early pay and employment odds. Whether it lasts depends on the same forces that created it: a labor market that stays tight enough to keep wages rising, and a generation that keeps pushing employers to compete. For now, young workers navigating a tougher entry-level hiring market can at least say they are entering it from a stronger position than the millennials who came before.