WASHINGTON – Initial claims for U.S. state unemployment benefits rose by 4,000 to 248,000 in the July 1 week, slightly ahead of the 245,000 level expected following an upward revision to the claims level in the previous week, data released by the Labor Department Thursday showed.
The claims data are only marginally above their recent lows and remain well below their year ago levels, indicating that the pace of layoffs remains slow.
The four-week moving average for initial claims, a better measure of the underlying trend of the data, rose by only 750 to 243,000 in the July 1 week.
If the number of headline claims does not change next week and there are no revisions to data from the past four weeks, the four-week average will rise by an additional 2,500 as the 238,000 level in the June 10 week rolls out of the calculation.
There were several states that provided estimates this week rather than hard data, mostly likely due to the shorter reported period created by the July 4 holiday. As a result, there could be a larger-than-normal revision to the July 1 week claims level with next week's release. The states that reported estimates were Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, and South Dakota.
Seasonal adjustment factors had expected an increase of 3.0%, or 7,087, in unadjusted claims in the week. Instead, unadjusted claims rose by 10,703 to 250,433, but were still below the 267,437 level in the comparable week a year ago.
The level of continuing claims rose by 11,000 to 1.956 million in the June 24 week, while the four-week moving average for continuing claims rose by 6,750 to 1.945 million.
The seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate held steady at 1.4% in the June 24 week for the twelfth straight week. The current week's rate is down from 1.5% in the same week a year earlier.
The unemployment rate among the insured labor force is well below that reported monthly by the Labor Department because claims are approved for the most part only for job losers, not the job leavers and labor force reentrants included in the monthly report.
