Virginia’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims for Week Ending June 20th

RICHMOND—The Virginia Employment Commission (VEC) announced that the number of initial claims filed from mid-March through the June 20, 2020 filing week totaled 874,779, which surpassed 21% of pre-pandemic, nonfarm employment, according to figures released today.

For the filing week ending June 20, the figure for seasonally unadjusted initial claims in Virginia was 25,293. The latest claims figure was a decrease of 1,893 claimants from the previous week. The weekly total was the lowest since before the initial spike in unemployment insurance claims during the March 21 filing week.   

For the most recent filing week, continued weeks claimed totaled 375,579, down 11,314 from the previous week, but 355,910 higher than the 19,669 continued claims from the comparable week last year. The continued claims total is mainly comprised of those recent initial claimants who continued to file for unemployment insurance benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continued claims during the June 20 filing week equaled 43% of all initial claims filed during the pandemic to this point. This percentage has trended downward in recent weeks.

For additional information on who is claiming unemployment insurance in Virginia, access the VEC’s    U.I. claims data dashboard (https://www.vec.virginia.gov/ui-claims-dashboard) that is updated no later than the following Monday after the weekly claims press release. 

Nationwide, in the week ending June 20, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 1,480,000, a decrease of 60,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The previous week’s level was revised up by 32,000 from 1,508,000 to 1,540,000.  The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 1,457,373 in the week ending June 20, a decrease of 5,990 (or -0.4 percent) from the previous week. The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending June 13 were in Oklahoma (+7,254), Texas (+5,047), New Jersey (+3,272), New York (+1,351), and Louisiana (+1,243), while the largest decreases were in Florida (-24,013), Maryland (-18,188), Massachusetts (-14,731), California (-14,412), and Michigan (-6,543).