It was around No. 87 when Soban Ali started to lose track of all his job applications.
He had moved to New York City, eager to start life away from the Washington area, where he was born and raised. But seven months after arriving, he was laid off from his job at a federal contractor during last fall’s government shutdown. So he started a spreadsheet: “The Great Job Hunt of 2025.”
He applied to roughly 450 openings. He landed upward of 10 interviews. He still doesn’t have a full-time job.
Now, Mr. Ali, 24, feels guilty telling friends he can’t join them for dinner. He wants to start a family one day, but worries. “I can’t even afford myself, so how am I going to afford someone else?” he said. And he laments that he can’t pursue some of the hobbies that have always brought him joy, such as hip-hop dance. Classes are too expensive: about $25.
“It’s this existential depression and existential dread of, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’” said Mr. Ali, who earns $18 an hour working part-time at an after-school program. That’s just $1 more per hour than minimum wage.
He wonders about five years from now: “Am I going to be making a good, livable income? Or am I going to be flipping burgers?”
It’s a rough time to be a young adult. Young college-degree holders face their worst spring in the U.S. job market since the coronavirus pandemic.
And if headwinds are blowing across the United States, they can feel like gale-force squalls in New York, one of the world’s most notoriously expensive cities.
Rents here are surging faster than in the rest of the country. Postings for entry-level jobs in New York City plummeted by more than 37 percent between 2022 and 2024. And student loan debt is rising: In no state do young adults between 25 and 34 hold more average debt at almost $38,000.
Mark Levine, the city comptroller, summed it up.
“Young people are facing a triple whammy.”
‘PLS HELP A GIRL OUT’
New York’s allure is unmatched. The city attracted more college graduates between 2021 and 2024 than Los Angeles and Chicago combined. About one in four New Yorkers — or more than 2.1 million residents — are between 18 and 34 years old.
That popularity as a landing spot helps foster the city’s competitive hiring market.
Today’s job market is nowhere as rough for young adults as it was during the Great Recession in the late 2000s or the depths of the pandemic. But the city’s unemployment rate for 22- to 27-year-olds with a college degree has risen to about 7.3 percent, slightly higher than for peers with no degree — and higher than national rates for their age group.
Those numbers fail to capture those who are stuck in low-paying work that doesn’t use their credentials — like Natalie Lui, a finance and marketing graduate who went from being an I.T. analyst at an investment bank to working part-time at a gym’s front desk.
Ms. Lui estimated that she has applied to at least 300 full-time positions. She put a call-out on TikTok: “please comment literally ANY and most effective ways to get a job in NYC. PLS HELP A GIRL OUT.”
“It took a lot out of me to even post that online,” said Ms. Lui, who turns 26 this summer and worries about affording health coverage after she’s kicked off her family plan. “But it’s come to that.”
In interviews, many young adults said that they felt lost at a moment when the path to a comfortable life appears filled with fresh obstacles.
The traditional milestones of adulthood — marriage, financial independence, living without roommates — seem ever more distant. And many young adults feel burned out by knowing that their résumés may never be read by a person and that artificial intelligence could upend the skills needed to succeed.
“I’m trying to figure out what it is: Is it an experience thing?” asked Mirko Mormile, 27, a Brooklyn College alumnus who was raised in the Bensonhurst neighborhood and studied business. He is a full-time digital content creator — “not entirely by choice,” he said — after applying to other work over the past year.
“Is it, am I not good enough?” said Mr. Mormile, who is living with his grandfather, helping to care for him after a fall.
The growing angst among young adults has led to crowdfunding pleas on GoFundMe and inspired punchlines for stand-up routines.
“I left my job this year, and I moved to New York cause I wanted to try unemployment on the most difficult level,” one comedian, Josh Martier, quipped during a recent set.
“Let me tell you, that city has not disappointed.”
One 22-year-old said that she arrived in New York last year with her cat and a suitcase, dog-sitting in exchange for housing. She couldn’t find work in Chicago after dropping out of college.
She had applied to more than 1,000 jobs, from marketing openings to positions at Trader Joe’s and Starbucks, but couldn’t get in the door. She worked as a stripper, but business was slow. So she began sex work.
Many of her friends are unemployed. One joined the military because he couldn’t find other work, and was recently deployed to Bahrain. “That’s just what our generation is,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss her sex work.
“I feel like no one cares.”
$7 coffee and soaring rents
But let’s say you succeed in finding a well-paying job. Congratulations: The reward is a cost of living crisis that devours your paychecks.
Utility bills are rising, and food prices in the New York City area surged by 56 percent between 2012 and 2022, faster than in the rest of the nation. The cost of a Citi Bike membership jumped by 41 percent during the past six years.
And a large cup of coffee can push $7 after tax.
“Even just the little things that young people find joy in aren’t really affordable anymore,” said Rosaury Valenzuela, 30, an alumna of City College of New York who lost her job with a nonprofit organization in October and has struggled to find listings that offer a living wage.
She misses simple conveniences, like buying food at a single grocery store. Now, she needs to visit four, shopping around for low prices. And she said that it feels like the cost of a night out in the city has tripled — or quadrupled.
For Ms. Valenzuela and many others, housing costs are also a burning issue as rents rise quicker than wages.
The apartment hunt is especially suffocating in a city where — as Eric Kober, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, put it — “the system is very much stacked against young adults,” with limited vacancies and few affordable options.
Carla Marie Davis, 34, a digital content creator born and raised in Brooklyn, has sometimes spent well over half her income on rent. She wanted to live alone but couldn’t find a budget-friendly studio or one-bedroom rental in or near her neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant.
So she looked into homeownership through the city’s affordable co-ops for lower-income residents and discovered that she needed far more assets to qualify. It took two years to find a co-op in her price range.
“It shouldn’t take the stars aligning perfectly and having all the luck in the world,” she said, grateful for the newfound stability. Her parents had already moved to Atlanta to live more comfortably, and she was “nearly pushed to the point of leaving” herself a few years ago.
Perhaps no American city is defined by its trade-offs quite like New York. Tight living quarters and eye-popping prices are the cost of living in a dynamic metropolis.
But some work force leaders fear that today’s tribulations threaten to prevent young native New Yorkers from staying and dissuade all but the wealthiest transplants from settling.
They say it would be a blow to the city’s culture and economy. Already, residents between 26 and 35 are twice as likely to move out as the rest of the population.
Among them was Gabriel Perez Silva, a 29-year-old photographer who recently left for Burbank, Calif., after more than seven years in New York. He traded a Brooklyn apartment whose bathroom he said was “crashing in on itself” for more work opportunities and better value. He’s closer to a park and even has a hot tub.
“My quality of life has completely skyrocketed,” he said.
Yet Mr. Perez Silva and other young adults still saw the city’s charm.
Deanna Richards, 27, aspires to act on Broadway, but had to put her aspirations on hold and prioritize stability after facing two bouts of unemployment within six months last year. She shares a roughly $1,000-a-month rent-controlled apartment with her boyfriend, and said she would not be able to survive without it.
Still, she relishes the city’s arts scene and industrious spirit: “It helps push me in moments where I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing?’ ”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Troy Closson is a reporter for The Times covering children, teenagers and young adults in New York City.
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