Unemployment numbers in the United States remained near a 15-year low last month even though initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by 10,000, to a seasonally adjusted 277,000 in the week that ended Sept. 26.

The figures, released on Thursday by the Department of Labor, continued to paint a positive picture of the overall U.S. economy, and Barclays economist Jesse Hurwitz noted that the total number of continuing unemployment benefits -- claims drawn for more than a week -- fell to the lowest level since November 2000, coming in at 2,191,000 for the week that ended Sept. 19.

"Stable initial jobless claims and remarkably low continuing claims suggest labor market health remains intact," Hurwitz told the Wall Street Journal.

The recent global stock market selloff so far has had little effect on the labor market, CNBC noted. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is forecast to have added 203,000 jobs in September, which means the unemployment numbers could drop even further in coming months, the business channel added.

Putting the employment situation in a historical perspective, MarketWatch pointed out that the claims average has not been this low since the presidency of Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, large companies are not expected to announce significant layoffs anytime soon, and many firms actually complain about an inability to find suitably skilled workers to fill open positions, the publication said.

Nevertheless, more than 16 million Americans who say they want a full-time job say they still cannot find one, a number MarketWatch dubbed "unusually high" at this stage of the economic recovery.

"Layoff activity remains modest," Tom Simons, an economist at Jefferies LLC in New York, told Bloomberg. "Labor-market conditions are pretty tight. The slack continues to decline."

The Labor Department, meanwhile, said there were no special factors impacting last week's claims, Fox News noted. Investors, for their part, seemed to largely ignore Thursday's figures, as the dollar traded lower and U.S. stock futures marked slight gains.