About this guide

This site is an independent guide to unemployment benefits in Massachusetts. It is not the Department of Unemployment Assistance, not MassHire, and not part of the Commonwealth.

What it covers

Each page takes one question and stops there, then hands you the Department's own page to act on. Between them the guides follow a claim from the account you open before you can apply, through the wage test, the weekly amount, and the weeks it runs for, to the weekly claim, a denial, an appeal, an overpayment, or a tax form. The offices, the phone lines, disability programs, and the state job bank each have a page as well.

How it is kept

Every figure, deadline, and phone number here, and every link to a government page, is checked against the Commonwealth's own published pages, and each page prints the date it was last checked. Each guide also lists the official sources behind it, so you can go and read the wording DUA used. Links to job boards are not official sources and are not covered by that check.

What it cannot do

This guide cannot see your claim, change anything on it, or decide whether you qualify. DUA decides all of that, and offices and phone numbers has the ways to reach it. Nothing here is legal advice either. Where a decision has gone against you, the route is the appeal the Department publishes, set out on denials, appeals, and overpayments, and a lawyer is who to ask about your own position in it.