About this guide

This site explains how unemployment benefits work in Alabama and then points you at the official page where you can act on the answer, whether that is Claimant Portal, one of the department's lines, or an Alabama Career Center.

The guides here cover filing a claim, who qualifies, how much a week pays and for how long, the weekly certification and the work search behind it, denials, appeals and overpayments, tax, the department's phone numbers and offices, disability benefits, looking for work, and the questions that cross more than one of those.

How this guide is kept

Every figure, deadline, and phone number on these pages, and every link to a government page, is checked against Alabama's own official pages, and each guide carries the date it was last checked. The official pages a guide draws on are listed on it, so you can go and read the department's own wording rather than a summary of it. Job boards are not official sources, and the boards named on the jobs page sit outside that check.

What this guide cannot do

No page here can open your claim, change what is on it, release a payment, or decide whether you qualify. Those decisions belong to the Alabama Department of Workforce, and they are made on your own record and the wages your employers reported. Nothing on this site is legal advice.

If a decision has gone against you, denials, appeals, and overpayments sets out the deadline and how to file one. If you need to reach a person, phone numbers and office locations lists which line answers which question, and contact covers the department's other routes in.