Summer jobs used to be a rite of passage. Stock the shelves, wait the tables, file the paperwork, and figure out what work actually feels like before the student-loan bill comes due.
For decades, the path was simple. A high schooler filled out an application at the mall, an undergrad chased an unpaid internship at a bank, and a fresh graduate took the entry-level analyst seat to grind their way up the corporate ladder.
That pipeline is breaking. Entry-level postings are down sharply, artificial intelligence is eating the routine white-collar work that used to season young workers, and the unemployment rate for recent college graduates now sits consistently above the rate for the overall workforce.
I have run the numbers on this labor market more times than I can count, and what is striking is how quickly young workers themselves have stopped waiting for a corporate ladder that may not actually be there.
The summer job in 2026 is a phone app.
The fastest-growing demographic on major gig platforms heading into summer is workers ages 17 to 25, with registrations up 8.4% year over year through May 17, according to mobile app analytics firm Apptopia.
Why Gen Z is signing up for DoorDash, Uber, and GoPuff this summer
Across six major delivery and ride-hailing platforms including DoorDash (DASH), Uber (UBER), Instacart, Lyft (LYFT), Shipt, and GoPuff, daily active users are up 19% year over year so far in the second quarter of 2026, according to Apptopia’s panel of roughly 15 million users.
DoorDash still runs the market, commanding 57% of all active gig workers across platforms. Uber sits at 28.7%.
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But the real story is the age breakdown. Workers ages 17 to 25 are the fastest-growing group on four of the six apps Apptopia tracks, and the year-over-year jumps are not small.
Platform-by-platform growth in signups from workers ages 17 to 25 midway through Q2 2026:
- GoPuff signups jumped 97.5% year over year.
- Lyft driver app signups rose 70.3% in the same demographic.
- Uber driver app signups climbed 27.4% in the same age band.
- Shipt signups increased 21.7% in the same group.
Source: Apptopia
Young workers are turning to gig platforms because they offer “flexible schedules and relatively quick access to income,” an Apptopia spokesperson said.
Pay also matters. GoPuff drivers report earning roughly $10 to $15 an hour with surge potential beyond that, while DoorDash drivers nationally have averaged around $25 an hour, according to various industry estimates.
Photo by Unaihuiziphotography on Getty Images
How the AI job squeeze is reshaping entry-level hiring
This is not happening in a vacuum. The reason Gen Z is downloading a driver app instead of signing the offer letter is that, in many cases, there is no offer letter.
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor’s degree was 5.6% in March, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The underemployment rate in the same group sits at 41.5%.
Postings on Handshake, the platform built around entry-level roles, are down 2% year-over-year and 12% below pre-pandemic levels, while the average number of applications per role has climbed 26%, Fortune notes.
Nearly nine in 10 graduates in the class of 2026 are worried that AI could replace entry-level roles, up sharply from 64% in 2025, based on a Monster survey cited in the same report.
Related: Uber rolls out a genius new perk customers will love
The C-suite has noticed. ServiceNow Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott told CNBC that unemployment for young people coming out of university “could easily go into the mid-30s in the next couple of years” as AI agents take over routine work, Fortune confirmed.
Goldman Sachs estimates AI is already displacing roughly 16,000 U.S. jobs a month, with Gen Z taking the brunt in routine white-collar work including data entry, customer service, and billing, Fortune added.
That is the same brutal backdrop driving the “forever layoffs” anxiety hitting workers up and down the org chart.
Not every employer is pulling back. IBM (IBM) Chief Human Resources Officer Nickle LaMoreaux said the tech giant is tripling Gen Z entry-level hiring because “the companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” Fortune explained.
What Gen Z’s gig pivot means for your wallet and your portfolio
App-stacking is the other piece of this story. A DoorDash driver has roughly a one-in-five chance of also driving for Uber, and a one-in-seven chance of working Instacart on the side, Apptopia shared.
More than half of users on the smaller platforms, including Shipt, Lyft, Instacart, and GoPuff, also run DoorDash routes, with up to 54% also active on Uber.
Translation: Nobody is really “working for” one app anymore. They are freelancing across all of them at once.
What struck me when I dug into the Apptopia panel is that the user-overlap behavior is bullish for the platform economics. The same young worker is generating revenue for two or three publicly traded gig companies on a single shift. That is not bad news if you own DoorDash, Uber, or Lyft.
It is bad news for the businesses that used to absorb summer labor. Mall retailers, casual-dining chains, and the corporate internship programs that fed the white-collar pipeline are competing against an app that pays the same day and lets the worker log off at 2 a.m. without asking a manager.
The forward question for investors is whether this is a summer blip or a permanent migration. Apptopia data showing year-over-year Gen Z growth jumping from 12% in May 2025 to 24% so far this May suggests the trend is accelerating, not fading.
If the AI hiring squeeze on entry-level white-collar work continues into 2027, the gig economy stops being a side hustle and starts being the first rung of the career ladder.
For your wallet, three things are worth tracking from here.
- How DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft hold or grow share as their labor pool ages with them
- Whether traditional summer-job employers reset wages to compete
- Whether colleges and policymakers start treating gig work as the real on-ramp it has quietly become
Related: Paycheck panic is changing work/life balance for Gen Z
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