Unemployment Insurance Claims

On a seasonally adjusted basis, initial claims for unemployment insurance increased by 851 to 24,833 but there was only a small increase of 60 in layoffs which were considered permanent. The number of initial claims remains at a level that indicates slow job expansion. Over the past year initial claims fell by 3,315, equal to a loss of 8.8 percent.  Of the 21 industry sectors 18 showed a decline in initial claims compared to January 2011, with 13 sectors showing declines in excess of 10 percent.  The sharpest declines came in information, finance and insurance, and unclassified with declines of 27.5, 20.9 and 19.7 percent, respectively.  There were two areas that showed a high percentage increase in initial claims annual including mining and management of companies but in both cases the numeric change was relatively small at +56 and +136, respectively.

Seasonally Adjusted Data (Excel)

Calendar of scheduled releases

  Subscribe to the RSS feed for this page.