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WASHINGTON — <\/span>The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits jumped last week but remains in the same historically low range of the past few years.<\/p>\n Applications for jobless aid for the week ending Jan. 31 rose by 22,000 to 231,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That\u2019s significantly more than the 211,000 new applications that analysts surveyed by the data firm FactSet had forecast.<\/p>\n Applications for unemployment benefits are seen as representative of U.S. layoffs and are close to a real-time indicator of the health of the job market.<\/p>\n A number of high-profile companies have announced job cuts in the past year, including UPS<\/a>, Amazon<\/a> and Dow<\/a> just last week. <\/p>\n On Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff<\/a>, eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage in a widespread purge at the storied newspaper owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. A private company, the Post did not disclose how many people it has on staff, making it impossible to estimate how many people were laid off. <\/p>\n Mounting layoff announcements in the past year, combined with the government\u2019s own sluggish labor market reports, has left Americans increasingly pessimistic<\/a> about the economy.<\/p>\n Last month, the government reported that hiring remained subdued in December, capping a year of weak employment gains<\/a> that have frustrated job seekers<\/a> even though layoffs and unemployment remained historically low. <\/p>\n Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month<\/a>, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June. <\/p>\n January\u2019s jobs report, which was scheduled for release Friday, has been delayed due to the partial government shutdown<\/a> earlier this week.<\/p>\n The U.S. economy gained just 584,000 jobs in 2025, an average of around 50,000 per month. That\u2019s sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024, which amounts to an average of nearly 170,000 per month. <\/p>\n The 2025 numbers represent the smallest annual job gains since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020. Outside of recessions, it\u2019s the slimmest annual increase since 2003. <\/p>\n The Labor Department also recently reported that businesses posted far fewer jobs in November than the previous month, a sign that employers aren\u2019t yet ramping up hiring even as growth has picked up<\/a>.<\/p>\n Businesses and government agencies posted 7.1 million open jobs<\/a> at the end of November, down from 7.4 million in October. <\/p>\n The data has revealed a labor market in which hiring has clearly slowed, hobbled by uncertainty raised by President Donald Trump\u2019s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to tamp down a spike of pandemic-induced inflation.<\/p>\n