What was claimed
One in six young people in Wales are unemployed.
Our verdict
This isn’t quite right. Although the youth unemployment rate in Wales is 16.3%, roughly one in six, this is only the percentage of ‘economically active’ 16-24 year olds who are unemployed. As a proportion of all 16-24 year olds in Wales, it’s more like one in ten.
In a post on Facebook this week, Plaid Cymru’s Senedd candidate for Gŵyr Abertawe, Harri Roberts, claimed that “one in six” young people are “unemployed”.
This isn’t quite right. Although the latest statistics estimate the youth unemployment rate in Wales is 16.3%, which is roughly one in six, this figure only refers to the percentage of ‘economically active’ 16-24 year olds in Wales who are unemployed.
As a percentage of all 16-24 year olds in Wales, unemployment is more like 9.6%—or roughly one in ten.
This claim was identified with the help of Full Fact’s AI tools, which are monitoring social media posts from candidates standing for the 2026 elections based on accounts listed by our friends at Democracy Club. You can read more about how we’re covering the 2026 elections here.
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Broadly speaking, the unemployment rate is the percentage of people who are available to work, but don’t have a job. We’ve written more about how unemployment is measured here.
As of September 2025, the unemployment rate for 16-24 year olds in Wales was 16.3%.
However, Mr Roberts’ claim doesn’t account for the fact that 41% of 16-24 year olds in Wales are ‘economically inactive’ (meaning they’re not working or looking for work), so the 16.3% figure does not refer to the overall percentage of 16-24 year olds in Wales who are “unemployed”.
Looking at the actual numbers involved, the September 2025 data shows that there were around 340,200 16-24 year olds in total. Some 201,000 of these were recorded as “economically active”, of whom 32,800 were counted as unemployed.
Roughly two-thirds of the 139,300 economically inactive young people in Wales are students.
It would be accurate to say that roughly one in six 16-24 year olds in Wales are not in education, employment or training (a category known by the acronym ‘NEET’). But this is a broader group that includes young people who are economically inactive but not studying or in training (including, for example, people who are unable to work for health reasons and people caring for family), as well as those who are looking for work (the unemployed).
We’ve contacted Mr Roberts for comment and will update this fact check if we receive a response.
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