Initial claims for unemployment benefits increased slightly to 221,000 for the week that ended March 30, according to data released Thursday by the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That number represents an increase of 9,000 applications from the previous week. Overall unemployment claims have increased as well from the previous week, by 1,035, to a total of just more than 2 million.
In addition, the four-week moving average fell by 750 to 1.8 million from the previous week.
“The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits increased to a two-month high last week, though labor market conditions remain fairly tight,” Reuters reported Thursday. “Some economists attributed the larger-than-expected rise in claims to an early Easter this year, which could have thrown off the model that the government uses to strip seasonal fluctuations from the data.”
The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending March 23 were in Texas (up 2,274), Missouri (up 1,312), Oregon (up 940), Illinois (up 788) and Ohio (up 785). The largest decreases were in Michigan (down 1,322), California (down 538), Mississippi (down 443), Connecticut (down 440) and Iowa (down 423).
“We won’t infer anything from one week’s rise in claims, particularly since it occurred around a holiday, when claims data can be noisier than usual,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead US economist at Oxford Economics in New York, told Reuters.
