At 23, Mohsin has a degree, a job and a salary that is gone by the 20th of the month. Rent, travel and groceries take most of it. What is left does not go toward a house, a wedding or savings. It barely lasts until the next payday. His father, at the same age, was already putting money aside for a plot of land on one income.
Mohsin’s generation was promised that education would lead to a comfortable, independent life. Many are now finding that the finish line has moved. The question is not whether young Pakistanis work hard enough. It is whether the economy rewards that effort the way it once did.
The life of 1980s
For many middle-class families in the 1980s and 1990s, the path was simple: finish school, get a steady job, and one salary could run a household. A home was possible by the early thirties.
It would be unfair to say earlier generations had it easy. They had their own struggles, with fewer chances to earn abroad, fewer tools, and often a big family depending on one person. But for many, pay and prices moved roughly together, and savings kept their value.
Pay went up, but so did everything else
On paper, wages have grown a lot. According to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, the average wage of a paid worker was Rs 6,612 in 2008 and Rs 39,042 in 2025. That is almost six times higher.
That sounds like a huge improvement, until you go to the shop. Take milk, a basic item for example. It cost about Rs 37 per litre in 2008. In 2025, it cost around Rs 220 per litre. In 2008, the month’s average wage bought almost 179 litres of milk. Today it buys about 177. Wages rose by six times, and so did the price of milk, so the extra rupees actually bought nothing extra.
However, the recent years show something more concerning. Between 2021 and 2025, the average monthly wage rose from Rs 24,028 to Rs 39,042, an increase of about 62 percent. Over the same years, the cost of everyday goods rose more than 80 percent, according to the consumer price index. In plain terms, a typical salary today buys less than it did four years ago, even though the number on the payslip is bigger.
This is why saving feels pointless to many young people. A rupee kept aside today buys less tomorrow, while rent, school fees and medical bills keep climbing. Financial independence is not just delayed. The target keeps moving away. According to the research report by the State of Housing Affordability in Pakistan, the House Price to Income ratio of Pakistan is about 5.06, which means that if a household on median income saved every rupee it earned, spending nothing on food, rent or bills, it would still take five years to buy a home.
Not enough jobs
Finding work is also getting harder. The latest government Labour Force Survey shows the unemployment rate rose from 6.3 percent in 2020-21 to 7.1 percent in 2024-25. In the mid-1980s, when many of today’s parents were starting out, government data show the figure was around 3 to 4 percent.
The pain falls hardest on the young. The highest unemployment rate is 12.9 percent of people aged 15 to 24. Among the educated women, the picture is worse: 23.9 percent of women with a degree or higher are unemployed.
Behind this is a simple mismatch. The number of people working or looking for work grew from about 71.8 million to 85.6 million in just four years, which is about a 3.5 million increase per year in the labour force. The economy has to create millions of new jobs every year, and it has not kept pace.
The quiet exit
Many have decided the answer is to leave. In 2025, over 762,000 Pakistanis went abroad for work, about 5 percent more than the year before. They included over 18,000 highly educated people, along with thousands of engineers, doctors and accountants.
Their money keeps the country going. Overseas workers sent home a record $38.3 billion in the year to mid-2025. But their departure also shows where many young people believe their future lies.
Those who stay
Those who stay are finding their own ways. Freelancing, online tutoring, small online shops and content creation have become a second job, and sometimes the main one. Pakistani freelancers earned a record $1.76 billion in export income in fiscal year 2025-26, as per the data by State Bank of Pakistan. These paths bring real income and real skills. But they are unpredictable, with no pension, no paid leave and no safety net.
The other side of the story
It is only fair to say that young Pakistanis also have chances their parents never had. A student in Lahore can now work for a client in London from a laptop. Starting a small business costs far less than it once did. The catch is that these chances are not shared equally. They go most easily to those with good internet, strong English and the right contacts, and many young people outside the big cities are left behind.
The road ahead
Mohsin will likely make it eventually, not because the system works, but through individual endurance. Yet individual hustle is a poor substitute for institutional accountability. A country cannot build a sustainable economic future when its most educated youth are forced to choose between insecure gig work at home or an exit visa abroad. Rebuilding economic independence for this generation requires more than resilience. It demands a fundamental renewal of the social contract, one where wages retain their purchasing power, credit is accessible, and hard work is once again rewarded with predictable stability.
The task for policymakers is to make that road shorter. The task for Mohsin’s generation is to keep walking it, with their eyes open about what it costs.