Who is eligible for unemployment insurance in Massachusetts?

Eligibility and disqualification sit in separate sections of Chapter 151A, and DUA weighs them separately. Section 24 says what makes you eligible, Section 25 says what takes it away, and a claim can clear the wage test and still be stopped by the reason the job ended.

The wage test and your base period

DUA's plain-language test is $6,300 in earnings over the last 12 months, and that is the figure to measure yourself against first.

The base period is the stretch of past wages DUA reads. The primary base period is your last 4 completed quarters. If it produces a larger maximum benefit credit, DUA instead uses the alternate base period: the last 3 completed quarters plus the time between the last completed quarter and the effective date of your claim.

Some earnings cannot establish a claim at all, however long you did the work. Income from nonprofit or religious organizations, state or federal work training programs, real estate or insurance commissions, independent contracting or consulting, self-employment, student work study, elected office, membership of a legislative or judiciary body, and certified seasonal employment all fall outside it.

Behind the $6,300 sits the statute's own test: base-period wages of at least 30 times your weekly benefit rate, and no less than the floor the statute set at $2,000 in 1995 and has raised every year since in step with the minimum wage, each rise taking effect on the first Sunday in January.

One more rule decides which state you file with at all. If you live in Massachusetts but your employer is located in another state, your claim belongs to that state, not to DUA.

Able to work, available for work, and looking

Section 24 asks you to be capable of, available for, and actively seeking work in your usual occupation or any other occupation you are reasonably fitted for. That test keeps running after approval: each week you file, you certify to it, and you take part in the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) program if you are selected for it.

The statute bends in a few places, and DUA's pages name a few more.

• Falling ill or becoming disabled after you have filed and registered does not make you ineligible, provided no work that would otherwise have been suitable was offered to you after the illness began. That exception covers 3 weeks in a benefit year, and no more.
• Attending an industrial or vocational retraining course approved by the commissioner counts as being available for work.
• Full-time students are generally not eligible, unless they meet the requirements of the Training Opportunities Program.
• You can claim while traveling for work, an out-of-state interview for instance, but not while traveling for personal reasons, and not while you are outside the United States, its territories, or Canada, even on a work trip.
• Part-time work does not end a claim. You report the earnings each week, and how much it pays sets out the part-time formula with DUA's own worked example.

Starting full-time work does end a claim. Stop filing the weekly claim the week the full-time job starts.

Why the job ended

Section 25 bars benefits after you leave work voluntarily, unless you can establish by substantial and credible evidence that you had good cause attributable to the employer. It bars them after a discharge the commissioner finds attributable to deliberate misconduct in wilful disregard of the employer's interest, or to a knowing violation of a reasonable and uniformly enforced rule or policy, unless that violation is shown to have resulted from your incompetence. It also bars them after a conviction of a felony or misdemeanor.

DUA regulations settle some discharges in advance. Stealing from the workplace, illegal drug use at work, and drunkenness at work each make an employee ineligible, whether or not the employer had a written policy against the conduct.

A disciplinary suspension is narrower. It bars benefits for as long as the suspension runs, and never for more than 10 weeks.

DUA's own FAQ gives a shorter list of denial reasons than the statute does: income that cannot establish a claim, quitting without good cause, and an employer reporting that you were fired for misconduct or for violating company policy. The statute is what decides a case, and it runs wider than that list, both in what it bars and in the exceptions it allows.

The ways out of a quit disqualification

Leaving a job does not close the door by itself. Section 25 names reasons for leaving that carry no disqualification at all, and each one is established to the satisfaction of the commissioner, which means the evidence is yours to bring.

• Domestic violence: reasonable fear of future violence at work or on the way to or from it, a need to relocate to avoid it, a need to address its physical, psychological, and legal effects, leaving as a condition of receiving shelter or support services, or any other respect in which it makes leaving necessary for your safety or your family's.
• Leaving in good faith to take new permanent full-time work, when you then lost that new job for good cause attributable to the new employer.
• Retiring under the terms of a pension or retirement program that requires it, even if you had previously agreed to the program.
• Reasons of such an urgent, compelling, and necessitous nature as to make the separation involuntary.
• Sexual, racial, or other unreasonable harassment, where the employer, its supervisors, or its agents knew or should have known about it.
• Leaving to enter training approved under the Trade Act of 1974, unless the work you left was itself suitable employment as that Act defines it.
• Being a crewmember on a commercial fishing vessel that closed because federal fisheries management restrictions stopped the employer from fishing.

A discharge has its own domestic violence exception, worded separately: no disqualification is imposed where you establish that the reason for the discharge was circumstances resulting from domestic violence, including your need to address its effects.

If that is your situation, SafeLink is the Commonwealth's statewide domestic violence hotline and answers on 1-877-785-2020 at any hour. Its advocates help with safety planning and with the support services the exception refers to.

Temporary agency workers have a rule of their own. Not contacting the temporary help firm for reassignment before filing counts as a voluntary quit, unless you were never advised in writing that you had to.

Turning down a job

Refusing suitable work, or failing without good cause to apply for it when the employment office sends you, costs the next 7 consecutive weeks on top of the waiting week, and DUA may cut the claim's duration by up to 8 further weeks.

Whether work is suitable is the commissioner's call. The statute sets out what goes into it: whether the job is detrimental to your health, safety, or morals; whether you are reasonably fitted for it by training and experience; whether it is within reasonable distance of your home or your last job; whether it reasonably accommodates a need to address the effects of domestic violence; and whether it demands travel expenses substantially greater than your former work did.

Some work is never suitable, and refusing it cannot be held against you.

• A position left vacant directly by a strike, a lockout, or another labor dispute.
• Work whose pay, hours, or other conditions are substantially less favorable to you than those prevailing for similar work in the locality.
• Work you could only take by joining a company union, or by giving up or limiting your right to belong to a bona fide labor organization.

Attending a certified industrial or vocational retraining course also protects you from this rule.

When your employer disagrees with your claim

DUA contacts you and your employers to confirm what happened, and your former employer has 10 business days to verify your employment and wage history. Each side makes its case to the commissioner, and the statute sets who has to prove what: on a quit, you establish good cause attributable to the employer by substantial and credible evidence; on a discharge, the misconduct has to be shown to the commissioner's satisfaction by substantial and credible evidence.

Answer every request while this runs, and keep filing weekly claims. Denials, appeals, and overpayments covers what to do with a decision that goes against you.

Requalifying after a disqualification

A disqualification under Section 25 is not permanent. The route back depends on why it was imposed, and the rows below are not the same test.