US filings for jobless aid tick up last week but remain at historically healthy levels

WASHINGTON: The number of Americans applying for jobless aid inched up last week as employers continue to retain workers despite a labor market that has weakened considerably in the past year.

U.S. applications for jobless aid for the week ending March 21 rose by 5,000 to 210,000 from the previous week’s 205,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s right in line with the 210,000 new filings analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet were expecting.

Filings for unemployment benefits are considered representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.
While weekly layoffs have remained in a healthy range mostly between 200,000 and 250,000 for the past few years, a number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts recently, including Morgan Stanley, Block, UPS and Amazon.

Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers unexpectedly cut 92,000 jobs in February, a sign that the labor market remains under strain. Revisions also slashed 69,000 jobs from December and January payrolls, nudging the unemployment rate up to 4.4%.

The surprisingly weak employment picture in February adds to the economic uncertainty over the war with Iran, which has caused oil prices to surge more than 40% and saddled business and consumers with higher costs.

This comes at a time when inflation was already relatively high in the U.S.

The Commerce Department recently reported that the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge rose 2.8% in January compared with a year earlier. That’s above the Fed’s 2% target and the latest sign that prices were persistently elevated even before the Iran war caused spikes in oil and gas costs.

That persistent inflation, combined with the uncertainties brought on by the conflict in the Middle East, led the Fed to leave its benchmark lending rate alone at its last meeting. Central bank officials voted to raise the rate three times to close 2025 out of concern for a weakening job market.

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 Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.

The Labor Department’s report Thursday showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which evens out some of the weekly swings, dipped by 250 to 210,500.

The total number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the previous week ending March 14 fell by 32,000 to 1.82 million, the government said. That’s the lowest number of continuing claims since May 25, 2024 when it was 1,804,000.