Initial Unemployment Claims (SA)

The Labor Department publishes a first count every Thursday for the week that ended the previous Saturday. The latest count is about the same as the week before, when claims were 198,000; a move that small is the size of a routine revision. A year earlier, in the week ending Sep 20, 2025, claims were 219,000, so this week's count is 22,000 lower.

An initial claim is a request, filed after losing a job, for a ruling on whether the filer qualifies for state unemployment insurance. The count is of claims, not people and not layoffs. Someone already in a benefit year who loses another job files an additional claim, some filers are found ineligible, and the national total includes Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Claims from former federal employees and newly discharged veterans go into a separate federal table and are not in this number.

The headline is seasonally adjusted: DOL strips out the swings that repeat every year, such as holiday layoffs, so one week can be set beside the week before. DOL says weekly claims are hard to adjust and can swing from week to week, so a single week is not a trend. Each week's first figure is revised the following Thursday, usually by 1,000 to 2,000, and each spring new seasonal factors rewrite past weeks. Here, a move of 2,000 or less is called little changed.

Initial claims are one of two inputs to the labor domain of the American Distress Index, beside the Unemployment Rate. DOL calls them a leading economic indicator but gives no lead time. Continued Unemployment Claims counts the weeks of benefits claimed after an initial claim, and the Challenger job-cut tally counts job cuts that employers announce, a separate measure from a private firm.