The number of Americans filing first-time claims for unemployment benefits jumped by 18,000 last week.
The Labor Department said Thursday that new applications for jobless benefits totaled 369,000 for the week ending last Saturday. The previous week claims had fallen by 3,000.The size of last week's increase caught economists by surprise. They had been looking for a more modest gain of around 3,000.
Still the increase came after three weeks of improvement. The four-week moving average for claims also rose to 357,750, its highest level since April. It had been 355,500 the previous week.
Analysts cautioned against reading too much into any one-week change in the volatile jobless-claims data. They noted that various other statistics show the labor market is thriving.
Last Friday, the government reported that the nation's unemployment rate fell to a six-year low of 5.3 percent in June as businesses added 239,000 new workers to their payrolls.
Many economists believe the country is now at full employment with scattered signs of wage pressures beginning to emerge. For that reason, there is a widespread expectation that the Federal Reserve will begin raising interest rates when they next meet on Aug. 20 in order to slow economic activity and ward off rising inflation.