Initial unemployment insurance claimants

This dataset includes unemployment insurance claimants filed with the North Carolina Department of Commerce. The raw data separately provides initial and continued unemployment insurance claimants, providing cross-tab summaries by geography, gender, race, ethnicity, age, and sector that vary in completeness. While this data provides a comprehensive summary of total unemployment insurance claimants, it contains missing information in the demographic breakdowns and in claimants without an assigned geography. Additionally, unemployment insurance claimants do not correspond directly with the rate of unemployed individuals, and backlogs in processing unemployment claims may distort the apparent timing of patterns in claimants. For more information, see the Government Accountability Office’s COVID-19 report, Appendix 23. The county-level data since March 2020 is available for public download and is updated approximately four weeks after the end of each month. In addition to county summaries, the raw dataset also includes geographic summaries for workforce development boards and the statewide total. Prior to March 2020, monthly unemployment insurance claims are published as weekly state-level summaries from the US Department of Labor with no disaggregation by race, gender, sector, age, or county.