WASHINGTON – The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits held steady last week, indicating that layoffs continue to be minimal across the nation.
The Labor Department announced Thursday that jobless claims for the week ending February 28 remained at 213,000, mirroring the figure from the previous week. This was slightly below the 215,000 claims anticipated by experts polled by FactSet.
These unemployment benefit claims are often seen as an immediate measure of layoffs in the U.S., serving as a timely reflection of employment market conditions.
In a recent report, the Labor Department revealed that employers in the U.S. added an unexpectedly high number of 130,000 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 4.3% from 4.4%. However, adjustments to government data have significantly lowered the job creation figures for 2024-2025, with the total number of new jobs last year revised down to 181,000, a stark contrast to the initially reported 584,000, marking the lowest growth since the pandemic year of 2020.
The government’s employment report for February is scheduled to be released on Friday.
Although weekly layoff numbers have generally stayed within the 200,000 to 250,000 range over recent years, some high-profile companies, including UPS, Amazon, Dow, and the Washington Post, have recently announced job cuts.
The Labor Department also recently reported that job openings fell in December to the lowest level in more than five years.
For now, the U.S. job market appears stuck in what economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” state that has kept the unemployment rate historically low, but has left those out of work struggling to find a new job.
Data over the past year has broadly revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty stoked by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.
Economists are conflicted about whether the stronger-than-expected January job gains are a one-off or possibly the first sign of a recovering labor market, which could lead the Fed to further delay more cuts to its key interest rate.
Some Fed officials have specifically argued that last year’s weak hiring shows that borrowing costs are weighing on growth and discouraging companies from expanding. A sustained pickup in hiring could undercut that theory.
The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which smooths out some of the weekly ups and downs, fell by 4,750 to 215,750.
The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Feb. 21 jumped by 46,000 to 1.87 million, the government said.
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