For the week ending Nov. 21, initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) totaled 8,121, up 871 claims, or 12.1%, compared to the previous week’s total of 7,243 claims, according to finalized data from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR). Through the week ending Nov. 21, there have been a total of 768,159 initial claims filed in 2020, 746,507 of which have been filed since the week ending March 14.
Continued claims, which represent the current number of insured unemployed workers filing weekly for unemployment insurance benefits, fell for the fifteenth consecutive week to 93,873, a decline of 2,999 claims, or 3.1%, from the previous week’s total of 96,872. This is the fewest continued claims for the regular UI program since the report week ending March 28 when there were 58,798 claims filed. This decrease in activity is largely due to claimants exhausting their regular unemployment insurance benefits.
TIMELINE: Nevada Dept. of Employment and handling of pandemic unemployment claims
Nevada’s Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which currently provides up to 13 weeks of benefits to individuals who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits, saw 95,965 claims filed in the week, an increase of 1,956 claims from last week’s total of 94,009.
Nevada’s State Extended Benefit (SEB) program currently provides up to 20 weeks of benefits to individuals who have exhausted both their regular and PEUC program benefits. Nevada saw 13,363 claims filed in the week, an increase of 1,752 claims from a week ago.
The insured unemployment rate for the regular UI program, which is the ratio of regular continued claims in a week to the total number of jobs covered by the unemployment insurance system (also known as covered employment), fell 0.2 percentage points to 6.7 percent. Including claimants in the benefit extension programs, the rate, more appropriately called the extended insured unemployment rate, was considerably higher at 14.6 percent.
There were 74,049 PUA continued claims filed in the week ending November 21, a decrease of 9,495 claims, or 11.4 percent, from the previous week’s revised total of 83,544. This is the fewest continued claims filed in any week for the PUA program.
