Massachusetts Weekly Unemployment Claimant Data

From May 3 to May 9, Massachusetts had 44,274 individuals file an initial claim for standard Unemployment Insurance (UI), a decrease of 10,949 over the previous week, and the sixth consecutive week of fewer initial claims filing over the previous week.

Since March 15, a total of 821,506 initial claims have been filed for UI. For the week of May 3 to May 9, there were a total of 576,172 continued UI claims, an increase of 3.6% over the previous week.

Since April 20, over 255,000 claimants have filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA).

Between both the UI and PUA programs more than 1 million unemployment claims have been filed in the Commonwealth.

Over the last month, the customer service staff at the Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) has grown from around 50 employees to over 1800. The remote customer service operation is now making over 32,000 individual contacts per day and DUA continues to host daily unemployment town halls – which have been held in English, Spanish, and Portuguese – and have been attended by over 240,000 constituents. Massachusetts was one of the first states to successfully launch the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program. Due to DUA’s previous efforts to migrate their systems to the cloud, the first unemployment agency in the country to do so, the unemployment online platforms for both regular UI and PUA has maintained functionality throughout the surge in demand.