CT Unemployment Figures Listed Town-By-Town

CONNECTICUT — Connecticut like much of the country is facing its most dire unemployment situation since the Great Depression.

The state Department of Labor has received more than 504,000 claim applications and 457,000 have been processed. Gov. Ned Lamont said Friday that the unemployment situation hasn’t been this bad in Connecticut since the Great Depression and that it dwarfs even the 2008 recession in terms of job losses.

Connecticut’s unemployment rate for the week ending April 25 was 18 percent, according to the federal Department of Labor. March 2020’s state unemployment rate was 3.9 percent; that figure doesn’t reflect the reality of COVID-19 impacts.

More than $1.27 billion in unemployment benefits have been paid out since the pandemic began to affect Connecticut; $511 million is from state benefits, $755.6 million is from the federal pandemic unemployment compensation and $7.7 million is from pandemic unemployment assistance.

The hardest-hit industry is accommodations and food services with more than 50,000 initial unemployment claims made between March 15 and April 26, according to DOL data. The healthcare/social assistance industry had more than 40,000 claims in the same time period. Retail trade saw more than 40,000 claims as well and self-employed saw more than 30,000 claims. The figures include data from after April 5 which is incomplete, according to the CT DOL.

Dental offices had the greatest number of claims in the health care/social service sector followed by child day care services and offices of physicians.

The hardest-hit age group for initial unemployment claims is workers between 20 and 29-years-old followed by those between 30 and 39-years-old, according to DOL data from March 16 to April 26.

As of the week of April 5 there were more than 268,000 people being paid unemployment benefits in Connecticut. April 5 is the last complete week of data from DOL. The following two weeks had around 282,000 people being paid benefits each week.

The unemployment data is inexact as DOL continues to reduce its backlog. It is expected that data will become more accurate as time goes on and the backlog is further reduced.

Below are town and other figures from DOL. The data comes with the following caveats:

• The claim counts you see in the tables may not match claim counts from other sources.
  • Because of the pandemic related events claims are being filed at historically unprecedented levels creating processing backlogs of 3-5 weeks.
  • Claims filed for a particular week will change as time goes on and the backlog is addressed. It may be useful to revisit these tables over a period of weeks.
  • The counts from other reports are valid as of a particular date and may not reflect updates as the backlog is addressed.
  • Counts from our online application system will not match initial claim counts because of duplication, disqualifying factors, and backlog issues.
• Unemployment claims represent only one component of the unemployed. Claims do not account for those not covered under the Unemployment system (e.g. federal workers, railroad workers or religious workers) or the unemployed self-employed.