LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — For the week ending March 20, initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) totaled 7,641, down 2,445 claims, or 24.2%, compared to the previous week’s total of 10,086 claims, according to finalized data from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR). Through the week ending March 20, there have been a total of 896,461 initial claims filed since the week ending March 14, 2020.
Continued claims, which represent the current number of insured unemployed workers filing weekly for unemployment insurance benefits, totaled 71,725 claims, an increase of 478 claims, or 0.7%, from the previous week’s total of 71,247. Continued claims have seen little change in the last five weeks.
Nevada’s Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides benefits to individuals who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits, saw 107,056 claims filed in the week, an increase of 10,675 claims from last week’s total of 96,381. The passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) significantly expanded the number of weeks that many workers will be able to collect pandemic-related unemployment insurance benefits. ARPA extended Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation through week ending September 4, 2021.
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 28,296 claims filed in the week, a decrease of 11,637 claims from a week ago.
The insured unemployment rate for the regular unemployment insurance 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), was unchanged from the previous week at 5.4%. Including claimants in the benefit extension programs, the rate, more appropriately called the extended insured unemployment rate, was 15.6%. It should be noted that the calculation of the insured unemployment rate is different from that of the state’s total unemployment rate.
The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides benefits for self-employed, 1099 contract workers, and gig workers saw 2,973 initial claims filed in the week ending March 20, a decline of 1,113 claims, or 27.2%, from last week’s total of 4,086. Initial applications for the PUA program continue to be highly variable due to ongoing high levels of fraudulent applications. Through the week ending March 20, there have been a total of 1,105,908 PUA initial claims filed.
There were 69,945 PUA continued claims filed in the week ending March 20, a decrease of 6,871 claims, or 8.9%, from the previous week’s revised total of 76,816.
