What is the maximum unemployment benefit in Massachusetts?

Your weekly amount comes out of wages your employers already reported to DUA, so the arithmetic is finished before your first payment. After you apply, DUA sends a Notice of Monetary Determination with the estimated figure on it.

How DUA works out your weekly amount

DUA starts from your average weekly wage in the base period, which is the last 4 completed quarters. Where it gives you a bigger maximum benefit credit, DUA can use an alternate base period instead: the last 3 completed quarters, plus the stretch between the last completed quarter and the date your claim takes effect. That same credit is the most the claim can pay across the year, and how long benefits last turns it into weeks.

The statute puts the same rule in harder terms: 50% of the average weekly wage in the base period, rounded down to the next full dollar, and never above 57.5% of the average weekly wage of everyone covered by the law. That ceiling is where $1,105 comes from. DUA reworks it on or before October 1 each year, and the new ceiling applies to claims whose benefit year begins on or after the first Sunday of October.

If your employer runs an approved WorkShare plan, DUA bases the amount on the share of your hours you lost rather than on total unemployment.

The dependency allowance for each child

A child you mainly support adds $25 a week to the payment, on top of the weekly benefit amount. Spouses do not count. DUA counts a child who is:

• under 18
• under 24 and enrolled as a full-time student
• over 18 and unable to work because of a mental or physical disability

The statute reaches a little wider than that list, to an unemancipated child in your custody while a court decides your adoption petition, to a child you are under court order to support and for whom nobody else is drawing the allowance, and to a child a court has appointed you guardian of. The child has to be domiciled in the United States or its territories.

Where both parents are drawing benefits for the same week, only one of them gets the allowance for any given child. Once the amount is worked out at the start of your benefit year, it is not cut for the rest of that year.

How part-time work changes a week's payment

You can claim while working part time, rideshare and meal delivery app work included, and you report what you earned on that week's claim. Earnings up to one third of your weekly benefit amount are disregarded. What sits above that line comes off the payment for the week, so a part-time week still pays something.

DUA works it through with its own numbers.

The statute caps the disregard from the other end: what is disregarded plus your weekly benefit rate can never reach your average weekly wage, and a partial payment is rounded down to the next full dollar. You may still be eligible after you start earning self-employment income, and you report that on the weekly claim too. Full-time work does end it, and you stop filing the week the full-time job starts. Filing your weekly claim covers where the earnings go on the form.

What can reduce your payment

DUA lists severance as income that may change your amount, and wants it reported on the application. The statute's retirement deduction is a separate rule, and it does not touch severance pay or Social Security benefits.

If the amount looks wrong

The Notice of Monetary Determination shows the wage and employer information DUA built the figure from. If any of it is wrong, the notice carries instructions for submitting an Affidavit to Correct Wages. That is a different route from an appeal, which denials, appeals, and overpayments covers, and which runs against a deadline.

Wages that can be used at all are their own question: who qualifies lists the kinds of work that cannot establish a claim.