McDonald’s UK keeps hiring steady, launches 2,500 paid youth placements

Lauren Schultz is betting McDonald’s UK can keep staffing up and still invest in workers even as wage costs climb and trading gets harder. The company’s latest move, a new paid youth work experience programme, will become a credibility test for whether the chain’s talk of long-term investment can survive the pressure hitting restaurants across the sector.

McDonald’s UK & Ireland said the programme will begin in July and offer 2,500 in-person placements in its first year, making it the biggest of its kind in the UK. The five-day placements are aimed at people aged 16 to 25, with a quarter of the spots reserved for young people who are not in education, employment or training, or who are at risk of becoming NEET. McDonald’s said the effort is meant to give young people a foothold in the labour market at a time when many employers are cutting back.

The scale matters. McDonald’s UK and Ireland has more than 1,450 restaurants and employs more than 135,000 people. The company says its restaurants typically have between 70 and 130 workers each, and more than half are open 24 hours a day. In that context, “investing in workers” is not just a slogan. It means keeping hiring steady, running a high-volume labour model, and using training and work experience to feed the pipeline for shift work, service, drive-thru operations, courier handoffs and stock-taking.

The youth push lands against a stubborn labour-market problem. The House of Commons Library said 957,000 people aged 16 to 24 were not in employment, education or training in October to December 2025, equal to 12.8% of that age group. The Office for National Statistics’ latest NEET release, for February 2026, shows the issue is still live. McDonald’s said it is acting because the UK is nearing one million young people outside work and education.

For crew members and managers, the message is that McDonald’s is still trying to use restaurant jobs as an entry point rather than a dead end. The company says it aims to help one million people in its communities gain new skills and opportunities through training, work experience and equal employment opportunities. One report said around 100,000 McDonald’s workers in the UK and Ireland are under 25, and one in three managers is under 25, which suggests the chain is already leaning hard on younger workers to fill and lead shifts.

That makes Schultz’s promise more than a public-relations line. If McDonald’s can keep hiring, train new starters, and turn short placements into real career steps while the wider sector trims labour, it will stand apart from competitors under pressure. If not, the gap between the company’s rhetoric and the reality on the floor will be easy for workers to see.