Slightly more Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as layoffs remain at relatively healthy levels.
The number of Americans filing for jobless aid for the week ending Feb. 21 rose by 4,000, to 212,000, from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s in line with the forecasts of analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet.
Filings for unemployment benefits are viewed as representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.
Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that U.S. employers added a surprisingly strong 130,000 jobs in January and the unemployment rate fell to 4.3% from 4.4%. However, government revisions cut 2024-2025 U.S. payrolls by hundreds of thousands, reducing the number of jobs created last year to just 181,000. That’s about one-third of the previously reported 584,000 and the weakest since the pandemic year of 2020.
