This release printed 226,000 a year ago and 199,000 on Thursday, and the whole of the week's rise in continuing claims is the seasonal adjustment

A year ago this release printed 226,000. On Thursday it printed 199,000.

That is the seasonally adjusted count of first-time claims for unemployment insurance, in the week ending 1 August, up 1,000 on a previous week revised from 197,000 to 198,000. The four-week moving average went the other way, down 4,500 to 198,750. Unadjusted, 171,246 people filed a first claim under state programmes, against 195,492 in the comparable week of 2025.

The Employment and Training Administration published the figures at 8.30 a.m. Eastern.

The rise that was a fall

The continuing side is where the arithmetic needs reading. Seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rose 24,000 to 1,801,000 in the week ending 25 July. Unadjusted, it fell 5,066, to 1,837,481.

Both numbers are printed in the same table and both are right. The seasonal factors had expected the raw figure to fall by 30,206, and it fell by roughly a sixth of that, so the adjustment turns a small decline into an increase. The initial claims line does the same thing on a smaller scale, where a raw fall of 5,289 came against an expected fall of 5,752.

The insured unemployment rate held at 1.2 percent on both measures, against covered employment of 153,732,307. A year earlier the rate was 1.3 percent, on a volume of 1,999,973.

The rest of the table

Counting every programme, 1,867,802 weeks of benefits were claimed in the week ending 18 July, down 4,603 on the week and down from 2,036,224 in the same week last year.

Fifteen of those weeks were Extended Benefits, across the whole country. No state was triggered on to the programme. Short-time compensation, the arrangement under which an employer cuts hours across a workforce rather than laying part of it off, accounted for 16,286 weeks, against 22,018 in the comparable week a year earlier.

Former federal civilian employees filed 450 initial claims in the week ending 25 July, up 32 on the week and down from 708 a year earlier. Newly discharged veterans filed 411.

The state detail lags the headline by a week. For the week ending 25 July the release names five increases in initial claims, Ohio at 629, Vermont at 347, Iowa at 111, Nevada at 64 and Maine at 49. Against those it names Michigan down 2,644, New York down 1,952, New Jersey down 1,377, Indiana down 1,340 and California down 1,313.

Two lines that run the other way

On the headline measures the year-earlier column is higher throughout: initial claims, insured unemployment, and total weeks claimed across all programmes, the last by 168,422.

Two small lines do not follow. Extended Benefits weeks came in at 15 against 10 a year ago, and newly discharged veterans filed 411 initial claims against 393.