The number of Americans who applied for unemployment benefits last week increased slightly, with the latest weekly total of initial applications reaching 745,000.
While some states have seen unemployment claims drop from record levels after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the US job picture last spring, others stubbornly suffered high job losses months after the recovery.
According to the latest US Department of Labor report, which details the rate of insured unemployment (proportion of people with unemployment insurance divided by the workforce) at the state level through February 13, Pennsylvania led all states with a 6.4% rate. Alaska followed with 5.7%, while Nevada and Rhode Island completed the top four states with insured unemployment rates of 5.4% and 5.1%, respectively.
All the states listed at the top are experiencing higher rates of insured unemployment compared to the national average of 3.1% in the same week.
As Yahoo Finance pointed out in early February, Hawaii has seen an incredible job recovery since it instituted COVID-19 tests and travel restrictions last October. The state has already led the country with an insured unemployment rate of more than 20%, but has since seen that drop to less than 5%.
Generally, even the worst states are beginning to approach pre-pandemic levels. At that time, Alaska led the country with a similar unemployment rate of just 2.9%. As high as they are now in the hardest-hit states, unemployment rates have still improved dramatically from the peaks seen months earlier. Nevada, for example, saw its unemployment rate improve by 21 percentage points, dropping from 27% to around 5% during the week ending May 9.
Looking at the unemployment statistics published in January by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures unemployment by the most traditional proportion of unemployed workers in relation to the size of the workforce, Hawaii and Nevada recorded the highest unemployment rate by that metric for the month of December by 9.3% and 9.2%, respectively. BLS data delay updates to the Department of Labor’s claims for unemployment benefits and are likely to show a widening gap between Hawaii and Nevada in next month’s report.
Zack Guzman is an anchor of Yahoo Finance Live and also a senior writer who covers entrepreneurship, cannabis, startups and breaking news on Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @zGuz.
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