The number of Americans applying for first-time unemployment benefits edged up last week but remained at a low level consistent with a generally healthy labor market.
Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 254,000 in the week ended Sept. 24, the Labor Department said Thursday.
“No labor market distress here,” Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson said in a note to clients.
Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 260,000 new claims last week. Claims for the week ended Sept. 17 were revised a bit lower to 251,000 from an earlier estimate of 252,000.
The four-week moving average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility in the claims data, fell by 2,250 to 256,000 last week. That matched an April reading as the lowest average since December 1973.
Initial jobless claims have now remained below 300,000 for 82 consecutive weeks—the longest streak since 1970, when the U.S. population and workforce were far smaller.
“It is difficult to communicate just how extraordinary these data have been over the past year,” Amherst Pierpont Securities chief economist Stephen Stanley said in a note to clients. He added that “basically, layoffs are as low as they have been in a long, long time.”
The Labor Department said no special factors affected the latest claims data.
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