US applications for jobless benefits rise last week, but layoffs remain historically low

More Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but U.S. layoffs remain in the same historically healthy range of the past few years.

Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending Aug. 16 rose by 11,000 to 235,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That's slightly more than the 229,000 new applications that economists had forecast.

Weekly applications for jobless benefits are seen as a proxy for layoffs and have mostly settled in a historically healthy range between 200,000 and 250,000 since the U.S. began to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic more than three years ago.


The four-week average of claims, which softens some of the week-to-week swings, rose by 4,500 to 226,500.

The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits for the previous week of Aug. 9 jumped by 30,000 to 1.97 million, the most since November 6, 2021.