AfterLayoff estimates unemployment benefits using each state’s real statutory formula — not a one-size-fits-all average — cross-checked against official government sources and dated so you can see exactly how current it is.
The backbone of every estimate is the U.S. Department of Labor’s “Significant Provisions of State Unemployment Insurance Laws” — the January 2026 edition, effective 2026-01-01. It is a public-domain compilation the DOL publishes for every state: the benefit formula, weekly minimums and maximums, benefit durations, dependents allowances and the wage thresholds you must meet to qualify.
It is an excellent starting point, but it is a summary — and summaries lag the statutes they summarize. So we treat it as a first draft, not the last word.
On 2026-07-04we manually verified the highest-traffic and flagged states directly against primary sources — state statutes and each state’s own official calculator — never third-party aggregators. That work covered 8 states:
Where the DOL document was stale or contained a typo, we corrected our data and noted it on the affected state page.
Verification is only worth doing if it changes something. It did. A few of the corrections that would have produced wrong numbers if we had trusted the summary alone:
Net effect: across the audited states we caught three defects that would have shown users the wrong dollar figure, and upgraded two states from “approximate” to line-by-line exact — bringing the count of precisely computable jurisdictions to 50 of 53.
Most estimator sites quietly divide your highest quarter by 26 for everystate and call it a day. Real state law is far more varied — percentage formulas, two-quarter averages, statutory benefit tables, hybrid dual-method rules that pay the higher of two calculations. We implement each state’s actual statutory method and show the formula we used on every state page, so you can check our work instead of taking it on faith. Our calculation engine is covered by 46 official worked-example regression tests drawn straight from the state agencies.
For states we audited against an official calculator, we follow that state’s own rounding rule (Texas rounds, California rounds up). For every other state we round down. The reason is deliberate: this is money you may be counting on, so we would rather the estimate come in a few dollars low than set an expectation the state won’t meet. Where a state’s official value can be slightly higher than our floor, we say so on that state’s page.
Unemployment numbers move on a calendar, and we track it. Several states re-index their maximum benefit annually — New York on the first Monday of October, Texas each October, and Arizona, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania each January — while others change only when the legislature acts, as Virginia did mid-2026. Each state page carries the effective date and, where applicable, the date we last verified it against the source, so nothing on this site is a number of unknown age.
The calculator runs entirely in your browser. The wages you enter are used to compute an estimate on your own device and are never stored, logged, or transmitted to us or anyone else. Close the tab and the numbers are gone.
Every estimate here is for informational purposes only and is not legal or financial advice. Your state’s unemployment agency solely determines your eligibility and the amount you receive. AfterLayoff is independent and not affiliated with any government agency. When you are ready to file, do it through your state’s official agency — each state page links directly to the right place.
Every state page shows the exact formula, source and verification date described above. Start with the states we audited most closely, or browse all 53.