18-24 Year Olds Are Starting Businesses at the Same Rate as Adults Now

18 October 2026 · 5 min read

For most of the last few decades, entrepreneurship skewed older — people in their thirties and forties with capital, experience, and an industry network were the ones most likely to start a company. That pattern has quietly reversed. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, US 18-24 year olds are now tied with 25-34 year olds for the highest Total Entrepreneurial Activity rate of any age group — the first time that's happened since GEM began tracking the measure.

The actual numbers

In 2013, roughly 10% of 18-24 year olds in the US were classified as actively starting or running a new business. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 25% — a two-and-a-half-fold increase over just over a decade. Put differently: nearly a quarter of people in this age group are currently running a business, and another fifth say they intend to start one within three years. This isn't a fringe statistic about a handful of standout founders — it describes a meaningful share of an entire generation.

Why this is easy to miss

Most coverage of young entrepreneurs focuses on outliers — a teenager who built an app that sold for millions, a college dropout who raised venture funding. Those stories are real, but they obscure what's actually happening at the base of the pyramid: a broad, sustained rise in ordinary 18-24 year olds starting ordinary businesses, not just a handful of extraordinary ones. The headline story isn't one unicorn founder — it's that a quarter of an entire age cohort is now doing this.

This didn't start at 18

It's worth noting what the GEM data doesn't capture: everything that happens before 18. A 22-year-old counted in this statistic didn't necessarily discover entrepreneurship the week they turned 18 — many will have had some earlier exposure, whether through a school program, a personal side project, or simply growing up in an environment where starting something online was normalized far earlier than it would have been a generation ago. The rise in young-adult entrepreneurship is downstream of a longer runway that increasingly starts in adolescence, not at the point this particular statistic begins counting.

Why this matters for anyone working with younger kids

If a quarter of 18-24 year olds are now running businesses, the more interesting question for parents, educators, and program designers isn't whether young people will become entrepreneurs — the data says a large share already are. It's whether they'll arrive at 18 having had any structured exposure to the actual skills involved — pricing, customer validation, handling a first sale — or whether they'll be learning all of it for the first time at the exact moment they're also trying to build something real. The gap between those two paths is significant, and it's the gap that earlier, hands-on exposure is positioned to close.

The bigger picture

A decade ago, youth entrepreneurship was a minor subcategory within a broader story about startups. The data now suggests something closer to a generational shift: an age group that's caught up to, and now matches, the cohort that's traditionally defined entrepreneurial activity. That's a bigger story than any individual founder's headline, and it's one that's happened gradually enough to go largely unremarked.

Statistics referenced are drawn from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's published national reports and are presented for general informational purposes.

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