What Unemployment Insurance Claims Can — and Cannot — Tell Us

Claudia Macaluso

Richmond Fed Economic Brief, 2026, vol. 26, issue 24

Abstract: Fewer people are losing their jobs: New claims for unemployment benefits are down, while the workforce covered by unemployment benefits has grown by 13 million since 2022. People aren't leaving the benefit rolls faster: The weekly exit rate has been flat near 11.7 percent since early 2025 — which is a quarter below its 2022 level — and a typical insurance spell now runs 8.2 weeks versus 6.5 weeks in 2022. The recent decline in continuing claims is not necessarily evidence of a recovering labor market. It is explained almost entirely by fewer arrivals, not faster exits. And the share of claimants leaving because they ran out of benefits (rather than because they found work) has more than doubled, from 3.3 percent of all exits in 2022 to 7.3 percent over the 12 months through June 2026.

Keywords: employment; and; labor; markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_brief/2026/eb_26-24 Briefing (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedreb:103581

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Richmond Fed Economic Brief from Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Pascasio ().