The short read
Five of the scorecard's seven measures — the ones that carry the argument. Every rating travels with its caveat, its counting basis and its source.
Then = the earliest published figure. Now = the latest. WORSE = moved the wrong way. CAN'T TELL = no fair comparison exists. MIXED = some better, some worse — or better overall, with the youth share unknown. Every rating travels with its caveat.
87 in 100 graduate — Toronto District School Board (TDSB) 87.4%, Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) 91.5%, Ontario 89.5%
No like-for-like earlier rate exists, so no trend can be judged. Earlier rates appear in other publications on different bases; none matches this one closely enough to call a trend.
Shootings and homicides both fell sharply in 2025 — 462 → 263 shootings, 85 → 45 homicides
No victim-age breakdown is published for either — how much of the improvement reached young people is unknown.
More money, spent in silos. SafeTO alone was funded at $43 million in 2025. No published total for youth exists.
The “See page …” links on the cards above open the reading volume — the 66-page PDF that gathers the study and the Toronto Youth Alignment Plan — at that page; the page numbers are the reading volume’s own printed pagination.
Prepared from published sources only. Figures as published in The State of Youth in Toronto (November 2026) and its Technical Appendix. Sources: 2021 Census of Population; Census Family Low Income Measure, After Tax (taxfiler data); City of Toronto Street Needs Assessment, 2021, 2024 and 2025; Public Health Ontario (Canadian Income Survey, pooled two-year estimates); Toronto Public Health student survey; TDSB and TCDSB Student Achievement Plans; Toronto Police Service; Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey.
Can Toronto tell whether its young people are better off than they were five years ago — from its own published numbers?
Toronto can't tell whether its young people are better off, because the numbers don't add up across systems. Where they do, most are moving the wrong way. The absence of published data is itself a finding.
Every figure prints its age band, geography, and year — the band, place, and year its source used. Figures are never added together across different bands, places, or years.
Ratings — WORSE / MIXED / CAN'T TELL say what changed and how much weight the comparison can carry. Each carries a confidence note.
An absence is a finding — where no figure is published at the study's standard, the study says so. Absence of public reporting is not absence of service or impact.
The City of Toronto last published an integrated report card on its children in the early 2000s. No Toronto-wide assessment of young people's condition — across income, housing, health, schooling, safety and work — has been published since.
This site presents the work under a shorter name — By the Numbers: The Toronto Youth Report. The published documents carry the formal title, The State of Youth in Toronto; the two names are one work.
The State of Youth in Toronto is an independent, published-source assessment of how Toronto's young people are doing, what governments publish about the response, and where the public record falls short. It rates seven areas of young people's lives — money, home, food, health, school, safety and work — using only figures governments and public bodies have themselves published, and it treats what is not published as a finding in its own right.
It is not a youth consultation report, an advocacy platform, or a wellbeing survey, and it makes no recommendations. It differs from Canada's federal State of Youth Report (2021), which is national and built from engagement with young people, and from the City of Toronto's own Toronto Report Card on Children, the integrated children's report card the City last published in the early 2000s. It complements the City's Investing in Youth Outcomes framework (2021): that framework guides how City programs measure themselves internally; this report asks what the published record allows the public to know.
Spending is not the gap. SafeTO alone was funded at $43 million in 2025. Toronto's Social Development figure works out to approximately $236 per resident aged 5 to 24 — an upper bound: the division's full gross budget, most of it not youth-specific, divided by the 2021 Census count of residents aged 5 to 24. What is missing is a shared account of results. Each program reports in its own units — visits, spaces, calls, dollars — and no published total for young people exists.
The seven measures in depth — money and housing, health, school and safety, and jobs.
Toronto counted 581,210 residents aged 5 to 24 in the 2021 Census — 20.8% of the city's population, out of a total of 2,794,356. Counting from birth, 704,760 residents were aged 0 to 24, or 25.2% of the city. Children aged 0 to 14 numbered 384,300, or 13.8% of the population, down from 14.6% in 2016. Young people aged 15 to 24 numbered 320,460, and the largest single band under 25 was ages 20 to 24, at 185,650. Between the 2016 and 2021 censuses, the population under 25 fell by 33,645. Every figure in this paragraph comes from that one census, counted on Census Day, May 11, 2021.
Toronto has no single child poverty number. On the Low Income Measure, After Tax (LIM-AT), 14.7% of Toronto children aged 0 to 17 lived in low-income households in the 2020 income year, as reported in the 2021 Census; that year included temporary pandemic transfers, which the source prints as a reason 2020 is not directly comparable with adjacent years. On the Census Family Low Income Measure, After Tax (CFLIM-AT), 25.3% of children aged 0 to 17 were in low income in the 2022 tax year — 117,890 children — on taxfiler data rather than the census. On the Market Basket Measure (MBM), Canada's official poverty line, the rate was 10.0% in 2020, for all ages across the Toronto CMA, not the city alone. These are three measures side by side, not a trend; no one of them continues another.
One series only. The Low Income Measure, After Tax (14.7%, 2020) and the Market Basket Measure (10.0%, 2020, Toronto CMA, all ages) are different measures and are not plotted here. Within its own series, children in one-parent families had a CFLIM-AT rate of 50.6% in 2022. Young people's median total income (ages 15 to 24, Toronto CMA) was $14,100 in 2024, down in real terms from $20,500 in 2020.
Source: Census Family Low Income Measure, After Tax (taxfiler data), 2020–2022.
Toronto's 2024 point-in-time count found 15,418 people experiencing homelessness on October 23, 2024, more than double the 7,347 counted on April 21, 2021. Both counts are single-night counts from the City's Street Needs Assessment, and they come with the City's own cautions: the 2018 and 2021 counts were held in April and the 2024 count in October; the 2021 count was taken while pandemic border measures were in effect; and the 2024 count included a large number of refugee claimants in the shelter system, 6,350 accommodated as of the count date. Youth aged 16 to 24 were 10% of people surveyed in the 2024 assessment, and the City estimates that more than 1,500 young people aged 16 to 24 experience homelessness on a given night in Toronto; the City does not publish the basis for this estimate. The 2025 count, held October 22, 2025, found 12,196 people, all ages; the City published no youth share for it.
Counts only; no rate. The bars are not joined and are not a trend series: the counts were taken in different months and conditions. Without a youth count on a comparable footing, no one in a city office can say whether youth homelessness is rising or falling — only that the overall count is in the tens of thousands. Toronto had 25 youth shelters at the end of the third quarter of 2025; average youth-shelter bed capacity was 699 beds, and 57% of youth were reported as having been unable to access a shelter bed when they tried in the past year. A City-published series prints the average market rent for a bachelor unit in Toronto as $1,456 per month in 2024, against a maximum Ontario Works shelter allowance of $390 per month for a single person in the same year.
Source: City of Toronto, Street Needs Assessment 2021, 2024 and 2025.
About one in four Toronto households was food insecure in the most recent published city estimate: 24.9% of households, over 753,000 people, in the Who's Hungry 2024 report; the successor report prints 24.7% of Toronto households in 2024. Both rates cover all households and all ages; neither publishes a Toronto rate for children or youth specifically. A Toronto rate for children was published once: Toronto Public Health prints that 18.5% of Toronto children and youth aged 1 to 17 experienced household food insecurity in 2019. Public Health Ontario now publishes Toronto child values only as pooled multi-year estimates — pooled meaning two survey cycles combined. The two sources use different surveys and different reference periods, so their figures are not one series and do not show a trend.
Public Health Ontario pooled two-year estimates, children under 18 — plotted apart from the single-year figure on purpose: Toronto Public Health's 18.5% for 2019 (single year, ages 1–17) is a different measure and is never joined to this row. No annual Toronto child rate is published for any recent year. Toronto food banks recorded 4,124,313 client visits in the fiscal year April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2025 — an 18% increase over the previous year's 3,488,351 visits. Visits count attendances, not unique individuals. Children were 25% of Toronto food bank clients in 2024–25.
Source: Toronto Public Health (2023); Public Health Ontario (2026), Canadian Income Survey.
Toronto Public Health reports that 37.0% of Toronto youth in grades 7 to 12 reported fair or poor mental health in 2023, up from 27.1% in 2019. In the same Toronto series, 18.0% of youth in grades 7 to 12 reported in 2023 that they seriously contemplated suicide in the past year, against 16.7% in 2019, a change the source describes as stable.
The same Toronto survey, the same question, four years apart. The clinical record is thinner for Toronto youth specifically: Toronto's rate of emergency department visits for intentional self-harm was 100.3 per 100,000 in 2022, up from 86.9 per 100,000 in 2013 — a series for people aged 10 years and older, not restricted to youth, and no youth-specific Toronto rate is published. Toronto Public Health publishes opioid-toxicity deaths for all ages only: 523 deaths in Toronto in 2023. No Toronto-specific wait time for child and youth mental health treatment is published.
Source: Toronto Public Health, student survey, 2019 and 2023.
Getting around: children aged 12 and under ride the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) free, a fare in place since March 1, 2015. Youth aged 13 to 19 pay a concession single fare of $2.35 on a PRESTO card set to the Youth fare type, or $2.40 in cash, against an adult fare of $3.30 on PRESTO. The City's Fair Pass Transit Discount Program is published for Toronto residents aged 20 to 64 years only; no youth eligibility line is published for the program. On road safety, the City's Vision Zero reporting publishes no killed-or-seriously-injured figure for any age band under 20.
In the latest Student Achievement Plans, the five-year graduation rate was 87.4% at the Toronto District School Board for the cohort that began Grade 9 in 2019–20, measured to 2023–24; the Catholic board stands at 91.5% and Ontario at 89.5%. The four-year rate for the cohort that began in 2020–21 was 81.8% at TDSB and 88.4% at TCDSB, against 84.9% for Ontario. By the end of Grade 10, the share of students earning 16 or more credits was 73% at TDSB and 85% at TCDSB in 2023–24, against 80% in Ontario. Suspensions run lower in the Toronto boards than across the province: 2.13% at TDSB in 2023–24, against 3.84% in Ontario. What happens after graduation is thinner in the record: no Toronto-level postsecondary participation rate is published.
Toronto Police Service counted 263 shootings and firearm discharges in calendar year 2025, down in count from 462 in 2024 and below the 492 recorded in 2019. Toronto Police Service (TPS) counted 45 homicides in 2025 — 20 by shooting, 14 by stabbing, and 11 recorded as other types — against 85 in 2024 and 98 in 2018. The study publishes these figures as counts only and makes no statement about why they changed.
Key finding: the counts improved sharply in 2025 — and the published record contains no victim-age breakdown for either, so it cannot say how much of that improvement reached young people. The police shootings dataset has no victim-age field and no accused-age field, and the homicides dataset's field list contains no age field for victims. That absence is part of the record. Youth justice — the Ontario and Canada series on charges, diversion, courts and custody — appears in the Technical Appendix; no Toronto city-level series is published at any stage of the system.
Source: Toronto Police Service, 2026. Counts only — the study publishes no rate and no statement about why the counts changed.
18.0% of Toronto CMA's labour force aged 15–24 was unemployed in 2025, against 12.3% in 2019. The employment rate was 44.8% in 2025, the participation rate 54.7%, and the population itself 937,900. These are Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey annual averages for Toronto CMA — the city plus surrounding suburban municipalities — not figures for the central city alone. The survey table behind this series was replaced in 2025, and the change is marked: 2019–2024 values are from the archived table, the 2025 value from its successor, which carries revised population controls.
2020–21 are years the study marks as a break (COVID) and does not smooth. Not in school or work: 13% of Ontarians aged 15–29 were not in employment, education or training in 2025; the Canada rate was 12%. No Toronto-level NEET series is published: the table appears at Canada and province level only. The commitments: 10,000 additional equity-deserving youth, ages 15–24, hired by summer 2026 — the goal a City Council motion carried in December 2024. Separately, and labelled as what it is: the commitment to create 15,000 new youth jobs is a campaign commitment, published in Mayor Olivia Chow's 2026 re-election campaign materials in October 2026; no City costing is published.
Source: Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, Tables 14-10-0385-01 and 14-10-0461-01.