It was steady as she goes in the U.S. job market last week.
The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits didn’t change last week and is still historically low, even in the face of high interest rates and elevated inflation.
According to statistics released Thursday by the Labor Department, 208,000 workers filed unemployment claims for the week ending April 27, the same as the previous week. That’s the fewest since mid-February.
The four-week average of claims, which softens some of the weekly volatility, fell by 3,500 to 210,000.
Weekly unemployment claims, considered a proxy for the number of U.S. layoffs in a given week, have remained at historically low levels since the pandemic purge of millions of jobs in the spring of 2020.
Last month, U.S. employers added a better-than-expected 303,000 jobs. The unemployment rate dipped from 3.9% to 3.8% and has now remained below 4% for 26 straight months, the longest such streak since the 1960s.
There are signs that the labor market may be softening. Earlier this week, the government reported 8.5 million job openings, the lowest number of vacancies in three years, the Associated Press reported.
In total, 1.77 million Americans were collecting jobless benefits during the week that ended April 20. That’s also the same as the previous week.
