Florida Weekly Jobless Claims Drop
TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) - Florida might have posted its lowest weekly total of jobless claims in at least 16 years.
The President's Day-shortened week ending Feb. 26 saw an estimated 3,122 initial unemployment claims filed in Florida, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report released Thursday.
The claims number, which will be revised next week, is down from a revised count of 5,510 for the week ending Feb. 19 and would mark only the third time since January 2006 that Florida recorded fewer than 4,000 claims in a week.
The other two times were also during holiday-shortened periods — the week ending Nov. 30, 2019, when 3,817 claims were filed, and Dec. 28, 2019, when 3,807 claims came in.
The Labor Department initially estimated Florida had 4,941 new claims during the week that ended Feb. 19. The estimate of last week's new claims lowered a running four-week average by 881 to 5,159 claims, which is similar to levels before the COVID-19 pandemic slammed the economy in early 2020.
Florida had a weekly average of 5,376 claims during the four weeks before March 15, 2020, the date designated as the start of the pandemic by state and federal agencies for unemployment reporting.
Meanwhile, 215,000 new claims were reported nationally last week, down 18,000 from the prior week.
The moving four-week national average is at 230,500. Florida's unemployment rate in December stood at 4.4 percent, representing an estimated 466,000 Floridians qualifying as jobless from a workforce of 10.66 million.
A January report will be released March 14.
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