Who qualifies for unemployment in Alabama?

Alabama settles a claim on your past wages first, and on the reason you stopped working second. A claim can clear the wage test and still be disqualified by how the job ended.

The wages your claim is built on

Your claim is worked out from your base period: the first 4 of the last 5 completed calendar quarters immediately before your benefit year starts. For a claim filed effective October 5, 2019, that was the 12-month period beginning July 1, 2018 and ending June 30, 2019.

You must have been paid wages for insured work in that base period equal to or above 1.5 times the wages paid to you in its highest-earning quarter, and you must also qualify under the section of Alabama law that sets the weekly amount. There is a second half to that test which is easy to miss: your insured wages have to fall in at least 2 quarters of the base period. Earnings packed into a single quarter do not qualify you, however large they are. How much it pays works through that amount.

Having drawn benefits in an earlier benefit year adds a test. You are not eligible in the next one until you have worked in insured employment since the earlier year began and earned at least 8 times the weekly benefit amount set for you in it.

A claim that fails the wage test establishes no benefit year, which lets you file again once your base period changes. Ask for the specific date your qualifying quarters change.

Able to work, available for work, and looking for it

Each week you claim is tested on its own. Alabama pays a week only where you claimed it under the Department's rules, registered for work at a state employment office and kept reporting there, were physically and mentally able to do work your past experience or training qualifies you for, were available for that work, and were totally or partially unemployed in it.

Available for work means you are in the vicinity, physically able, and free to accept work during the full-time hours and full work week, and for the shifts normally worked in the trade or industry you are qualified for. Being available for part-time work only does not meet that test. The exception is a person with a disability, who has to show a reasonable and active effort to find work in an amount they are qualified for, supported by medical documentation of their inability to hold full-time employment. Being in the vicinity does not require you to be physically present, only to be reachable by telephone or other electronic means. Willing to accept work means showing a willingness to take any work you are qualified for by previous training or experience and that is suitable under Alabama law.

Being able to work is a hard gate. Where sickness or injury stops you working, you stay ineligible until you can provide proof that you are able to work.

You must also make a reasonable and active effort to secure work: systematic and sustained efforts, including contacting at least 3 prospective employers for each week you claim. Jury duty under a lawfully issued summons is not a failure to seek work. Nor is a temporary, customary, or seasonal layoff from an employer who normally gives you permanent, continuing work, where that layoff is not expected to run past 8 weeks. The Governor may suspend the work search requirement by executive order during a state of emergency, as far as federal law permits. Weekly claims and work search covers how a week is filed and proved.

Turning work down carries its own penalty. Failing without good cause to apply for or accept available suitable work, or to return to customary self-employment when the Department directs it, disqualifies you for not less than 1 nor more than 5 weeks from the date of the failure.

Why your last job ended

Which side has to prove the case turns on how the job ended, and it is worth knowing before you decide whether to argue. If you quit, the burden of proof is on you, to show you left for a good work-connected reason. If you were fired, it is on your employer, to show the termination was for a work-connected cause the Alabama UC Law names.

If you quit

Alabama disqualifies an individual who left their most recent bona fide work voluntarily without good cause connected with that work. The disqualification is not a number of weeks. It runs from the week of the quit until you have reentered insured employment, earned wages there equal to at least 10 times your weekly benefit amount, and been separated from that employment under nondisqualifying conditions. The total benefits you would otherwise be entitled to are also reduced by not less than 3 nor more than 9 times your weekly benefit amount.

The law names its exceptions:

• Sickness or disability. You are not disqualified if you were forced to leave because you were sick or disabled, notified your employer as soon as it was reasonably practicable, and returned to that employer and offered yourself for work as soon as you were able again. The exception falls away where the employer had an established leave of absence policy for sickness or disability and you did not follow it, or did not return when the leave expired.
• A military spouse's orders. For a separation on or after August 1, 2012, you are not disqualified if you left your employment to relocate permanently as a result of an active-duty military-connected spouse's permanent change of station orders, activation orders, or unit deployment orders.
• Going straight back to work. You are not disqualified if you left and immediately returned to work with your regular employer, or to employment in which you already held statutory or contractual seniority or recall rights.

The sickness exception stops the quit disqualifying you, and does no more. It does not authorize paying benefits for a week you are unemployed through sickness or disability, or a week inside a leave of absence granted under an established leave policy. Pregnancy leave has a limit on that. Where the leave is for pregnancy, the bar lifts after the 10th week following the end of the pregnancy. From that week on, benefits are not denied to a woman who gave her employer 3 weeks' notice that she wanted to return, is able to work by then, and has not refused a job that would be deemed suitable for her.

Which layoff you were offered decides this. Where you have the option of continuing to work or being included in a temporary layoff, a period not to exceed 6 months, and you opt to be included, you are not deemed to have left the employment voluntarily. Where the layoff you opt into is a permanent one, you are deemed to have left voluntarily, and the department then works out from all the facts whether you had good cause connected with the work. A significant change in job duties, rate of pay, or other conditions of employment is where that good cause particularly may lie.

If you were fired

A discharge in Alabama is not one rule. Which one the Department applies decides whether you wait out a few weeks or wait until you have earned your way back in.

Where the disqualification is for misconduct or a disciplinary suspension, your total benefits also drop by the number of disqualified weeks multiplied by your weekly benefit amount. Where the discharge was for a dishonest or criminal act or one of the others grouped with it, you can never afterwards draw benefits on the wages that employer paid you for that period of employment.

If a labor dispute is why you are out

A week is disqualified where your total or partial unemployment is directly due to a labor dispute still in active progress at the establishment where you are or were last employed. The rule covers a controversy over the terms, tenure, or conditions of employment, or over who represents workers in setting them. It does not cover a dispute between an individual worker and their employer.

If you work for a school

If you worked in an instructional, research, or principal administrative capacity for an educational institution, benefits are not paid for a week between academic years or terms, or during a paid sabbatical your contract provides for, where you have a contract or reasonable assurance of working in such a capacity for any educational institution in the second term. A post lined up at a different school still counts. Staff in any other capacity are barred between two successive academic years or terms where they have reasonable assurance of returning, and the sabbatical clause does not reach them.

If you were denied as a school employee in a capacity other than an instructional, research, or principal administrative one, and that second term's work is then not offered, you are entitled to retroactive payment for each week you filed a timely claim for and were denied solely under that rule. Keep filing your weekly certifications right through the denial, because a week you did not claim on time is not a week you can recover afterwards. You also have to tell the Department the promised work fell through, backed by written notice from the institution, within 5 calendar days of receiving that notice, and you must still have met the work search and every other eligibility requirement for the weeks you are claiming.

When your employer gives a different reason

When a new or additional claim is filed, the Department notifies your last bona fide employer and asks why you were terminated. The employer returns the form with its reason for the separation, or fails to return it. Where the information the employer gives conflicts with what you gave, you must be given the opportunity to rebut the employer's reason.

If the determination still goes against you, denials, appeals, and overpayments covers how to challenge it and how long you have.

Other money and other work while you claim

Working part time does not by itself end a claim. Where you did not ask for the cut in hours, a week in which your gross weekly earnings are less than your weekly benefit amount pays a reduced amount. How much it pays sets out how a part-time week is worked out and what you report.

Only the kinds of income Alabama law names can affect eligibility at all: wages; wages in lieu of notice, a dismissal, or a separation allowance; pensions; receipt of, or application for, unemployment compensation from another state; workers' compensation for a temporary disability; and a training allowance.

Social Security does not reduce an Alabama unemployment benefit. A pension, retirement or retired pay, annuity, or other similar periodic payment under the Social Security Act or the Railroad Retirement Act is neither deductible nor disqualifying. The statute's reduction reaches only a payment from a plan a base period employer maintains or contributes to, 100% employer-financed, made under neither of those Acts, where your services for that employer after your base period began affected eligibility for, or increased, it.

Self-employment has a rule of its own, and it turns on your time rather than on what the work pays. A paid, self-directed activity counts as self-employment only where you devote a substantial and considerable amount of time to it, read as more than 50% of a normal work week; what the activity earns is immaterial. Once it counts, you are disqualified for that week and each week after, until you establish that you are no longer self-employed.

Seeking or receiving temporary-disability workers' compensation disqualifies that week, unless it is finally determined you were not entitled to it. Where it is less than the benefits otherwise due, you may receive the difference for that week if you are otherwise eligible.

Getting back on benefits after a disqualification

A quit and the most serious class of discharge end the same way. You reenter insured employment, earn at least 10 times your weekly benefit amount in it, and leave it for a nondisqualifying reason. After that class of discharge, the wages your old employer paid you stay off the table for good.

A disqualification set in weeks runs out on its own. Where it was for misconduct or a disciplinary suspension, your total benefits are also cut by those weeks multiplied by your weekly benefit amount. The 1 to 5 week disqualification for refusing suitable work carries no such cut.

A fresh benefit year has its own bar: wages of at least 8 times the weekly benefit amount set in the year before it, earned in insured employment since that year began.