A job seeker holds papers at the Mega Job News USA South Florida Job Fair held at Amerant Bank Arena on September 25, 2026 in Sunrise, Florida.
Joe Radle | Getty Images
Employers continue to retain workers even as employment remains depressed, with weekly jobless claims near the lowest levels in nearly 60 years.
The number of new jobless claims for the week ending Oct. 17 fell to a seasonally adjusted 194,000, the Labor Department said Thursday.
This marks another decline in the low fire trend, with the total just shy of the 189,000 reported the week of July 18, the lowest since the late 1960s. Over the past year, claims have averaged 212,000, with a four-week rolling average of 197,750.
These figures come against a background of uncertainty in the labor market.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by just 29,000 in September, and will average just 69,000 monthly gains in 2026. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2%, but this increase was mainly due to a sharp increase in the labor force participation rate. Layoffs remain modest, down by 61,000 jobs in August, according to data released Sept. 29 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Over the past 12 months, the layoff rate, measured as a percentage of total employees, fell to 1%, a decline of 0.2 percentage points over the period. Job openings remained relatively flat during this period.
“Despite the extremely pessimistic outlook in the Consumer Confidence Survey on the broader economy and countless headlines about layoffs from various companies and the phantom job-killing power of AI, claims data suggests that labor market conditions are stable,” Thomas Simmons, chief U.S. economist at Jefferies, said in a note to clients.
This data is obtained during the base week that the BLS uses to calculate salary increase numbers. September employment statistics will be released on November 5th.
Fed officials will meet next week to announce their latest decisions on interest rates. Policymakers in recent days have focused more on the labor market as a source of overall strength and the thorny issue of inflation, which has kept prices rising well above the central bank’s 2% target.
Although the Fed will not raise interest rates in October, market expectations are that it will raise rates by another quarter of a percentage point in December.
