U.S. Jobless Claims Surge by 22,000, Marking a Two-Month High

WASHINGTON – The latest figures from the Labor Department indicate a rise in the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits, though the overall number remains within the historically low range seen over the past few years.

For the week ending January 31, there was an increase of 22,000 new claims, bringing the total to 231,000. This figure surpassed analysts’ expectations, as those surveyed by FactSet had anticipated 211,000 new applications.

Unemployment claims are a key indicator of layoffs and provide near real-time insights into the condition of the U.S. job market.

In recent months, several major companies have announced workforce reductions. Notable examples include UPS, Amazon, and Dow, which all made cuts just last week.

In a significant move on Wednesday, The Washington Post cut about one-third of its workforce, including the closure of its sports section, several international bureaus, and its books coverage. The newspaper, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, did not reveal its total staff numbers, making it difficult to assess the exact number of layoffs.

Mounting layoff announcements in the past year, combined with the government’s own sluggish labor market reports, has left Americans increasingly pessimistic about the economy.

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

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

January’s jobs report, which was scheduled for release Friday, has been delayed due to the partial government shutdown earlier this week.

The U.S. 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 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.

The 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 tamp down 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, last week the U.S. central bank left its benchmark lending rate unchanged in the midst of a broadly improving economic outlook and what officials called a stabilizing labor market.

Thursday’s report from the Labor Department also showed that the four-week moving average of jobless claims, which balances out some of the week-to-week gyrations, rose by 6,000 to 212,250.

The total number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the previous week ending Jan. 24 grew by 25,000 to 1.84 million, the government said.