New claims for unemployment benefits jumped last week to a 16-year high, the Labor Department said Thursday, providing more evidence of the weakening job market.

The government said new applications for jobless benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 542,000 from a figure of 515,000 in the previous week. That's much higher than Wall Street economists' expectations of 505,000, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

That is also the highest level of claims since July 1992 when the U.S. economy was coming out of a recession. In addition, the number of people continuing to claim unemployment insurance rose sharply for the third straight week to more than 4 million, the highest since December 1982, when the economy was in a painful recession.