CARSON CITY, NV – As virus numbers continue to go up in Nevada, claims for first-time unemployment benefits continue to drop.
For the week ending November 7th, initial claims for unemployment insurance were down 7.4 percent compared to last week’s total, according to finalized data from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR).
Continued claims, which represent the current number of insured unemployed workers filing weekly for unemployment insurance benefits, fell for the thirteenth consecutive week to 105,591, a decline of 7.1 percent from the previous week’s total. This is the fewest continued claims since the report week ending March 28th.
Nevada’s insured unemployment rate, which is the ratio of continued claims in a week to the total number of jobs covered by the unemployment insurance system (also known as covered employment), fell 0.6 percentage points to 7.6 percent. 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 up to 46 weeks of benefits for the self-employed, 1099 contract workers, and gig workers saw 18,485 initial claims filed in the week ending November 7, a decrease of 63.5 percent, from last week’s total. This marked decline comes after unprecedented increases in the previous two weeks. DETR is looking into the underlying cause of the spike.
PUA continued claims totaled 90,611 in the week ending November 7th, a decrease of 9.3 percent, from the previous week’s total, while Nevada’s Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides up to 13 weeks of benefits to individuals who have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits, saw an increase of 4,134 claims from a week ago. A continued increase in the number of PEUC claims is expected as claimants exhaust their regular program benefits.