Initial jobless claims fell by nearly 26% last week in Nevada

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For the week ending Feb. 13, initial claims for unemployment insurance in Nevada totaled 7,378, down 2,575 claims, or 25.9%, compared to the previous week’s total of 9,953 claims, according to data released Friday, Feb. 19, by the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR).

Through the week ending Feb. 13, there have been a total of 851,469 initial claims filed since the week ending March 14, 2020, according to DETR.

Continued claims, which represent the current number of insured unemployed workers filing weekly for unemployment insurance benefits, totaled 77,310 claims last week, a decrease of 2,448 claims, or 3.1%, from the previous week’s total of 79,798, according to the state.

Other stats and figures released Friday are as follows:

• Nevada’s Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides benefits to individuals who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits, saw 59,448 claims filed in the week, a decline of 2,989 claims from the previous week’s total of 62,437.
• Nevada’s State Extended Benefit (SEB) program currently provides up to 20 weeks of benefits to individuals in regular UI who have exhausted both their regular and PEUC program benefits. Nevada saw 73,899 claims filed in the week, an increase of 3,572 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 to 5.8% from the previous week’s rate of 6.0%. Including claimants in the benefit extension programs, the rate, more appropriately called the "extended insured unemployment rate," was 15.9%.
• The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides benefits for self-employed, 1099 contract workers and gig workers, saw 12,432 initial claims filed in the week ending February 13, a decline of 23,028 claims, or 64.9%, from last week’s total of 35,460.
• Initial applications for the PUA program continue to be highly variable due to ongoing high levels of fraudulent applications. Through the week ending February 13, there have been a total of 1,080,544 PUA initial claims filed.
• There were 99,931 PUA continued claims filed in the week ending February 13, a decrease of 23,026 claims, or 18.7%, from the previous week’s revised total of 122,957.

Go here to read the full weekly report from Nevada DETR.