BTC US Initial Jobless Claims: 206.0K
How many Americans filed for unemployment benefits for the first time last week. It is the fastest honest reading of whether the US economy is cracking.
Every week the US Department of Labor counts how many people filed a first claim for unemployment insurance. It arrives eight days after the week it covers, which makes it one of the few genuinely fresh readings of the American labour market.
A low, flat line means people are keeping their jobs. A sustained climb has preceded every US recession, and recessions are when central banks cut rates — which is why crypto desks watch a labour-market number at all.
Single weeks are noisy: storms, strikes and holidays move the raw figure, which is why the four-week average is drawn beside it. Read the average.
The weekly claim count is published as-is and stored unaltered. The four-week average is ours: the plain mean of that week and the three before it, drawn **only** once four real weeks exist behind it.
WEEKLY. One point per week, stamped the Saturday the week ended — **never** a daily line. The figure is revised the following week, and our upsert takes the revision, so an old point can change slightly. Seasonally adjusted by the publisher. History runs from January 1967.
ALERT THRESHOLD. The claims alert reports a week-over-week change beyond −9.227% or +11.309% — the MEASURED 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles of 3,106 weekly changes (1967-01-14 → 2026-07-18). On that history the bands changed 254 times — 68 into a big fall, 74 into a big rise, 112 back to ordinary — about 4.3 a year, and 3.5 a year over 2010–2026. One honest consequence of the revision policy **above**: our upsert takes the revision, so a revision large enough to move the reading into a different band will send a second message.
U.S. Employment and Training Administration, Initial Claims, via FRED series ICSA. Public domain.
FRED ICSA — US Employment and Training Administration, initial claims, seasonally adjusted · weekly (week ending Saturday) · history from 1967-01