Jobless claims soar above 6M

In the week ending March 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claimswas 6,648,000, an increase of 3,341,000 from the previous week's revised level.This marks the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series. The previous week's level was revised up by 24,000 from 3,283,000 to 3,307,000. The 4-week moving average was 2,612,000, an increase of 1,607,750 from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 6,000 from 998,250 to 1,004,250.

The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 5,823,917 in the week ending March 28, an increase of 2,903,757 (or 99.4 percent) from the previous week. The seasonal factors had expected a decrease of 23,150 (or -0.8 percent) from the previous week. There were 183,775 initial claims in the comparable week in 2019.

The total number of people claiming benefits in allprograms for the week ending March 14 was 2,105,219, an increase of 98,832 from the previous week. There were 2,040,256 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2019.