UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS - WHEN YOU HAVE TWO JOBS

If you hold several jobs (or have one job and side gigs) and you’re laid off from one, you may qualify for partial unemployment (MATTER OF VARGAS, 185 AD 3d 1339 - NY: Appellate Div., 3rd Dept. July 23, 2020) if you lost that job through no fault of your own. Some states award partial unemployment benefits based on your hours worked. However, some, like New York, base your benefit amount on the number of days worked during the week. 

But not any more. The NY DOL issued the following email yesterday:

Dear New Yorker: At Governor Cuomo’s direction, NYS DOL has changed the way partial unemployment benefits are determined for those who are working part-time. With the new regulation, partial unemployment insurance (UI) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) benefits will now be based on the number of hours you work in a week instead of the number of days you work. This update will go into effect for work completed during the benefit week of Monday, January 18, 2021 to Sunday, January 24, 2021 – and all benefit weeks going forward. The first time you certify under this new system will be on or after Sunday, January 24, 2021. Under the new approach, you can work up to 30 hours in a week and still receive some unemployment benefits if you earn $504 or less in gross pay. Instead of having your benefits reduced by 25% for each day you engage in part-time work, reductions will be based on hours worked. NYS DOL's certification system will still ask for the number of days you worked — you should use this chart to convert the hours you worked into the number of “days” to report. When totaling hours for each week, you should only count up to 10 hours per day. That means if you worked 12 hours in one day, you will only count 10 of those hours in your weekly total for that day. For more information and FAQs, go to on.ny.gov/partialui. Again, this certification change will go into effect starting on Sunday, January 24, 2021. Please screenshot and bookmark this page so that you can refer back each week when you certify. Thank you. Click here to opt-in to additional updates from the NYS Department of Labor.