1.3 million Americans filed first-time unemployment claims last week

Another 1.3 million people filed first-time jobless claims on a seasonally adjusted basis last week, according to the Department of Labor. That's down 10,000 from the prior week's revised level.

On an unadjusted basis,1.5 million people filed first-time claims, up almost 109,000 from the week before. The seasonal adjustments are traditionally used to smooth out the data, but that has tended to have the opposite effect during the pandemic.

Weekly first-time unemployment applications have been on the decline for more than three months since their peak in the last week of March.

Continued claims, which count workers who have filed claims for at least two weeks in a row, stood at 17.3 million for the week ending July 4, down 422,000 from the prior week. These claims peaked in May at nearly 25 million.