Despite corporate announcements of global layoffs, including of remote workers (while hiring through the other door).

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Continued weekly claims for unemployment insurance benefits fell to 1.827 million, the lowest since September 2024, according to the Labor Department today. These continued claims track the total number of people who’d initially applied for unemployment insurance at least a week earlier and are still claiming unemployment insurance because they still haven’t found a job

They have been zigzagging lower since their recent peak in July 2025 (1.968 million) and are down by 141,000 from that peak.

These continued claims are relatively low in a historic context. Over the past five decades, it’s only during the tight labor market in 2018 and 2019 and in the years of the labor shortages in 2021 and 2022, that the level was lower. But back then, nonfarm payrolls were quite a bit smaller. It indicates that people remain on unemployment insurance rolls a little longer than in 2022-2024 during the labor shortages, and in 2018-2019 during the tight labor market, but not as long as they did at any time in the prior decades.

This is administrative data collected from state unemployment agencies. It is not survey-based data. Laid-off people who still haven’t found a job filed these unemployment insurance claims at state unemployment agencies, which then report them to the US Department of Labor by the weekly deadline, which then combines the data and publishes it.

Initial applications for unemployment benefits (“initial claims”) in the week through Saturday declined to 209,000, which is historically low.

This weekly data is notoriously volatile as some states might not get their claims data submitted before the deadline, in which case the data is included in the following week. When a big state does that, it moves the needle, low one week, high the next week.

The four-week average, which the Department of Labor also releases and which largely irons out the week-to-week squiggles, inched up to 206,250 initial claims.

There were only a few weeks in the decades since the 1970s when the four-week average of initial claims was even lower.

This shows that employers overall are clinging to their workers despite some global layoff announcements by some big companies that get the attention in the media, even if these layoffs don’t all happen in the US, and even if these announced layoffs don’t always lead to actual layoffs, but to jobs elsewhere in the company, etc. Amazon is an example of that. And there are ulterior motives.

Home Depot made it explicit today: It announced 800 layoffs, with about 650 of them being remote workers, the remainder being at its corporate headquarters. And it came with the announcement to employees that everyone would have to go to the office five days a week, starting April 6. And for those who refuse, well…

So despite these layoff announcements that percolate through the media, this unemployment insurance data – both continued unemployment claims and initial unemployment claims – show no signs of a weakening labor market in terms of companies shedding employees.

But job creation has slowed – and companies overall are not adding to their staff in large numbers. It’s still an open question how much of that is related to the crackdown on illegal immigrants that then causes labor scarcity in some sectors where employers have a harder time filling those jobs. The Census Bureau just released new data on the falling population of foreign-born people in the US as a result of a surge of emigration (including from deportations and voluntary deportations) and a sharp slowdown of immigration, which I discussed here.

And for people who are looking for a job, there is another issue: That workers are now also clinging to their jobs, after the huge wave of quits during the labor shortages that reshuffled the entire workforce. A person who quits one job to go to another job leaves behind a job opening that the company can choose to fill, which opens opportunities for people looking for a job. There was a huge amount of churn of that type during the labor shortages, but that churn has calmed down. And that makes it harder for people looking for a job to slip into a newly opened slot that a quitter had left behind.

And in case you missed it: Americans’ Incomes from Wages & Salaries, Businesses & Farms, Rentals, Dividends & Interest, and Transfer Receipts

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WOLF STREET FEATURE: Daily Market Insights by Chris Vermeulen, Chief Investment Officer, TheTechnicalTraders.com.