Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits rose last week by the most since the onset of the pandemic, underscoring the volatile nature of claims at this time of year.
Initial claims increased by 44,000 to 236,000 in the week ended Dec. 6, according to Labor Department data released Thursday. That was the biggest jump since March 2020 and followed the lowest level of applications in more than three years in the previous week, which included Thanksgiving. The figure exceeded all but one estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
Weekly initial claims tend to be choppy around the holidays and will likely continue to fluctuate through the end of the year, but Thursday’s figures are toward the higher end of readings seen in 2025. Companies like PepsiCo Inc. and HP Inc. have laid out plans to reduce headcount in recent weeks, and nationwide layoffs in October were the highest since early 2023.
Pantheon Macroeconomics said the jump in claims suggests layoffs are picking up. Others like High Frequency Economics disagreed, noting that the claims figure is still quite low over a longer period of time. Either way, it’s too hard to make a real judgment about the labor market from these numbers alone given the seasonal noise.
“Don’t read too much into the jump in jobless claims,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, said in a note. “Smoothing it out, this still looks like an economy averaging 215,000 to 220,000 new jobless claims a week. That’s not a cause for concern.”