Initial claims fell 6,000 to 206,000, and the fall only reaches 6,000 because the week before it was revised up by 3,000

Two hundred and six thousand. That is the advance seasonally adjusted count of initial unemployment claims for the week ending 15 August, and the Labor Department publishes it as a decrease of 6,000.

The comparison it is a decrease against is not the number anybody read last week. The week ending 8 August was originally published at 209,000. It has been revised up to 212,000. Measured against what was printed at the time, this week's figure is lower by 3,000, and measured against the revised level it is lower by 6,000. The release gives the second version, which is the standard and correct convention, and it is worth knowing which one is on the page.

The average went the other way

The four week moving average, which exists to stop any single week carrying more weight than it deserves, rose 4,250 to 204,000. Its own previous reading was revised up as well, by 750, from 199,000 to 199,750. The three weeks the release prints run 199,000, 199,750 and 204,000, so the smoothed series has crossed 200,000 while the headline number was falling.

A year ago the same average stood at 225,500 and initial claims stood at 233,000.

What the seasonal factors expected

The unadjusted count is the one that moved. Actual claims filed under state programmes came to 172,080, down 17,123 on the week, or 9.1 percent. The seasonal factors had expected a fall of 12,077, or 6.4 percent. The adjusted series fell because the real one fell by more than the model allowed for, which is the whole mechanism behind the headline.

Insured unemployment works the other way this week. The unadjusted level fell 17,509 to 1,797,050, but the factors had expected a fall of 35,615, so the seasonally adjusted level rose 18,000 to 1,799,000. The insured unemployment rate stayed at 1.2 percent. A year earlier it was 1.3 percent on a volume of 1,955,067.

The state detail belongs to a different week

The release reports state movements a week behind the headline. For the week ending 8 August the largest increases in initial claims were Michigan, up 1,931, New York, up 1,379, Texas, up 1,324, South Carolina, up 1,268, and Illinois, up 994. The largest decreases were much smaller: Ohio, down 252, then Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana and North Dakota, none of them down by more than 103. The release gives no cause for any of them.

Across all programmes, continued weeks claimed for the week ending 1 August came to 1,839,126, down 21,302 on the week and down from 2,005,772 in the comparable week of 2025. No state was triggered on to the Extended Benefits programme.