US applications for jobless benefits tick down to 209,000 last week

[AP Photo]

U.S. applications for unemployment benefits inched down modestly last week, remaining at historically healthy levels despite recent high-profile layoff announcements.

Applications for jobless aid for the week ending Jan. 24 fell by 1,000 to 209,000 from the previous week’s number which was revised upward by 10,000, the Labor Department reported yesterday. Analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet were expecting 205,000 new applications.

Applications for unemployment benefits are seen as representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.

An assortment of high-profile companies have announced job cuts in the past year, including UPS, Amazon and Dow this week alone. That, combined with the government’s own sluggish labor market data, has left Americans increasingly pessimistic about the economy.

Earlier this month, the government reported that hiring remained tepid in December, capping a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment remained low.

Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower.

The economy gained just 584,000 jobs in 2025, an average of around 50,000 per month. That’s sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024, which amounts to an average of nearly 170,000 per month.

The 2025 numbers represent the smallest annual job gains since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020. Outside of recessions, it’s the slimmest annual increase since 2003.

The January jobs report is due out next Friday, with analysts forecasting another ho-hum 50,000 job gains.

The Labor Department also recently reported that businesses posted far fewer jobs in November than the previous month, a sign that employers aren’t yet ramping up hiring even as growth has picked up.

Businesses and government agencies posted 7.1 million open jobs at the end of November, down from 7.4 million in October. Layoffs also dropped as companies seem to be retaining workers even as they are reluctant to add staff, a trend economists refer to as “low hire, low fire.”

Recent government data has revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty raised by President Donald Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.

The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to shore up a softening labor market trimmed its benchmark lending rate by a quarter-point three straight times at the end of last year. However, on Wednesday, the U.S. central bank chose to leave its benchmark lending rate alone in the midst of an improving economic outlook and what officials called a stabilizing labor market.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the four-week average of jobless claims, which balances out some of the week-to-week ups and downs, rose by 2,250 to 206,250.

The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Jan. 17 fell by 38,000 to 1.83 million, the government said. That’s the fewest since Sept. 21, 2024. MATT OTT, WASHINGTON, MDT/AP