TOP 10 Countries by NEET Rate among Youth (15–24, 2025)
NEET youth in 2025: a small group of countries carries a disproportionate share of global disengagement
The NEET indicator – young people aged 15–24 who are Not in Employment, Education or Training – has become a central measure of how well economies convert schooling into real labour-market opportunities. While the global average NEET rate has slowly declined since 2010, progress is uneven and fragile.
This section looks at the TOP 10 countries with the highest NEET rates among youth in 2025, using ILOSTAT and OECD data, and highlights where the risks of long-term exclusion from work and learning are most acute.
What the NEET rate actually measures
The NEET rate is often misunderstood as simply “youth unemployment”. In reality, it captures a wider group: young people who are neither working nor enrolled in education or training. This includes:
- Unemployed jobseekers actively looking for work
- Discouraged youth no longer searching for jobs
- Inactive carers & others often women doing unpaid care
High NEET rates therefore signal lost human capital, a higher risk of long-term exclusion and, ultimately, weaker productivity and growth.
Table 1. NEET rate among youth (15–24), TOP 10 countries by total rate, 2025
Estimated NEET rates by sex, based on the latest ILOSTAT and OECD values around 2023–2024, projected to 2025. Percentages refer to the share of all 15–24-year-olds who are not in employment, education or training.
| Country | NEET total, % | NEET men, % / NEET women, % |
|---|---|---|
| South Africa | ≈ 46 | ≈ 41 / 51 |
| Turkey | ≈ 33 | ≈ 24 / 43 |
| Italy | ≈ 21 | ≈ 18 / 24 |
| Greece | ≈ 20 | ≈ 17 / 23 |
| Colombia | ≈ 27 | ≈ 22 / 32 |
| Brazil | ≈ 24 | ≈ 19 / 29 |
| India | ≈ 30 | ≈ 18 / 42 |
| Egypt | ≈ 32 | ≈ 22 / 43 |
| Morocco | ≈ 29 | ≈ 20 / 39 |
| Jordan | ≈ 34 | ≈ 23 / 47 |
Chart 1. Youth NEET rate (15–24), TOP 10 countries by total share
Note: values are rounded to whole percentages and are indicative, based on the latest available ILOSTAT and OECD youth NEET data extrapolated to 2025.
How NEET rates changed from 2010 to 2025
Looking only at a single year can be misleading. In several high-NEET countries, the current rate is the product of two competing forces:
- Long-term improvements driven by rising school completion and targeted youth programmes.
- Short-term shocks from recessions, the COVID-19 pandemic and episodes of political instability.
In southern Europe, NEET rates surged after the global financial crisis and euro-area crisis, then fell gradually as labour markets recovered. In emerging economies such as Brazil and Colombia, progress during the 2010s was partly reversed by the pandemic and macroeconomic turbulence.
Table 2. NEET rate among youth (15–24), 2010 vs 2025 (total, both sexes)
Approximate NEET rates in 2010 and 2025 for selected high-NEET countries, illustrating the direction of change. Positive values in the last column mark a decline (improvement), negative values an increase.
| Country | NEET 2010, % | NEET 2025, % (change in p.p.) |
|---|---|---|
| South Africa | ≈ 42 | 46 (−4) |
| Turkey | ≈ 32 | 33 (−1) |
| Italy | ≈ 23 | 21 (+2) |
| Greece | ≈ 26 | 20 (+6) |
| Brazil | ≈ 22 | 24 (−2) |
| Colombia | ≈ 26 | 27 (−1) |
| India | ≈ 32 | 30 (+2) |
| Egypt | ≈ 34 | 32 (+2) |
| Morocco | ≈ 31 | 29 (+2) |
| Jordan | ≈ 35 | 34 (+1) |
Chart 2. NEET rates for young men and women, selected countries, 2010–2025
Trend lines are illustrative, based on ILOSTAT and OECD time series for youth NEET by sex in Turkey, Italy, South Africa and India, smoothed to highlight persistent gender gaps.
Behind every percentage point in the NEET rate are tens or hundreds of thousands of young people whose transition into adult life is stalling. Evidence from longitudinal studies shows that extended spells as NEET are associated with:
- lower lifetime earnings and weaker attachment to the labour market,
- higher risks of poverty, ill-health and social isolation,
- reduced trust in institutions and lower civic participation.
For countries already facing rapid population ageing, maintaining high NEET rates among youth is a double loss: future workers are not accumulating experience today, and social spending pressures will be higher tomorrow.
1. What the TOP 10 tells us about structural problems
The countries with the highest NEET rates in 2025 are diverse, but they share several structural features:
- Weak school-to-work links. Employers often do not trust qualifications, and young people lack access to apprenticeships or paid internships.
- High informality. In South Africa, India, Brazil and Colombia, many entry-level jobs are informal, unstable and poorly protected. Youth may cycle between inactivity and short spells of informal work.
- Limited childcare and social support. In several MENA and South Asian countries, young women shoulder unpaid care responsibilities without parallel options for flexible work or study.
These problems are not easily fixed by a single programme. They cut across education policy, labour regulation, social protection and gender norms.
2. Policy responses that have made a measurable difference
International evaluations highlight a few areas where sustained policies have reduced NEET rates or prevented them from rising further:
- Targeted youth guarantees. In the European Union, youth guarantee schemes commit public employment services to offering a job, traineeship or education place within a fixed period after a young person becomes unemployed or leaves education.
- Dual vocational systems. Countries with strong apprenticeship traditions tend to show smoother school-to-work transitions and lower NEET rates, especially for non-university tracks.
- Care-aware policies. Expanding childcare and parental leave options, combined with campaigns around girls’ education, helps reduce female NEET levels over time.
3. Why gender-sensitive monitoring is essential
Because women are often overrepresented among NEET youth for reasons beyond the labour market (care work, norms around mobility, early marriage), aggregate NEET figures can hide unequal progress. A falling overall NEET rate may mask the fact that gains are concentrated among young men.
Disaggregating data by sex, age, location and education level allows policymakers to identify segments where barriers are particularly high – for example, rural young women with lower-secondary education who lack access to both quality jobs and further education.
4. The 2025–2030 outlook: risks and opportunities
Looking ahead, several forces will shape youth NEET trajectories:
- Digitalisation and AI will change demand for skills, potentially widening gaps between high- and low-qualified youth.
- Green transitions create new jobs but require rapid re-skilling and investment in technical education.
- Demographic trends mean that in some regions, youth cohorts are shrinking, while in others they remain very large.
Countries that combine accurate monitoring of NEET trends with proactive policies on skills, inclusion and gender equality are more likely to turn these shifts into an opportunity rather than another source of exclusion.
Reading NEET data for policy design
For ministries of labour and education, the priority is not only to track the NEET headline rate, but to analyse who the NEET population actually is: age sub-groups, qualification levels, urban vs rural, care responsibilities, disability. Targeted programmes are most effective when they focus on clearly identified segments rather than “youth” in general.
Using international benchmarks without copying blindly
The TOP 10 countries by NEET rate should not simply copy policies from low-NEET countries. Instead, they can use international benchmarks to test different combinations of measures – from apprenticeships and wage subsidies to childcare and transport support – and evaluate which packages work in their specific labour-market and institutional context.
Data sources
The figures and rankings in this article are based on the latest publicly available datasets and analytical reports on youth NEET rates:
- ILOSTAT – Youth labour statistics and NEET indicators
- ILOSTAT database – Indicator YTH_2NEET_T (youth not in employment, education or training)
- OECD Data – Youth not in employment, education or training (NEET) by age and sex
- ILO – Global Employment Trends for Youth reports
- World Bank – NEET youth briefs and diagnostics
- OECD – Youth Employment and Skills policy resources
Download tables and charts (youth NEET rate TOP 10)
The ZIP archive contains an Excel file with both tables and high-resolution images of the bar chart and the gender line chart for TOP 10 countries by NEET rate among youth (15–24).
