About the Project

The surge in job loss in 2020 exposed deep flaws in the unemployment insurance (UI) safety net, with major delays and uneven access. Now that federal pandemic UI benefits have expired, the core responsibility for unemployment aid sits with the states. 

TCF’s new Unemployment Insurance Dashboard is a new,  comprehensive database showing access to state benefits for unemployed workers. The dashboard illustrates how state UI programs too often have more holes than safety nets. For example, as of the twelve months ending May 2022, only 29 percent of jobless workers were receiving a state UI payment, down from 76 percent for the year ending January 2021. This is just one of the many structural flaws exposed through this interactive tool. 

This project is intended to give policymakers, researchers, and advocates the information they need to identify areas of reform. Importantly, the intersection between racial equity and unemployment benefits has been poorly understood. Our new Demographic and Racial Equity Explorer demonstrates, for example, that states with large Black populations pay out the least generous benefits.

What’s included in this dashboard?

The indicators in the project answer four key questions:

  • How well does UI work? The dashboard includes data on what percent of claims are denied, as well as how long it takes to pay benefits to eligible workers, settle claims disputed by employers, and process appeals of decisions. These include core federal performance standards on which states are judged by the federal government.
  • How much does UI pay? The dashboard includes data covering the average and maximum unemployment benefit amount in each state, as well as what percentage of workers’ prior wages are replaced by these benefits.
  • How many are getting UI? The dashboard includes data detailing current applicants and recipients of state UI benefits, what share of the unemployed collect them, and how many recipients exhaust benefits before finding a job. Information is displayed as raw figures and per-capita, not seasonally adjusted.
  • How is UI financed? Each state is responsible for financing its own benefits through state taxes and a state trust fund. The dashboard includes data on whether state trust funds stack up to national standards and the average tax rate on employers.

What other unemployment resources does TCF have?

TCF’s landmark Pandemic Unemployment Dashboard, launched October 2020 and continuously updated, chronicled how well the UI system functioned throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and is still available as an archive here. 

Building on that work, this new dashboard includes more than 50 unemployment insurance indicators for each state over time, which allow for comparisons between the states in benefit levels, timeliness, administration, financing, and recipiency. 

Additionally, TCF has newly launched:

  • The Unemployment Insurance and Racial Equity Explorer, which allows users to compare differences in state populations by race side-by-side with the state’s access and adequacy of unemployment benefits.
  • The fact sheet function, available through the above Racial Equity Explorer, generates a customized state fact sheet comparing variables chosen from the database to all neighboring states.

What if I want to work with the data myself?

The raw data for the project is available in a spreadsheet that includes all of the data here, plus data in the (archived) pandemic dashboard. Working with the data requires you to make a copy of the posted view-only “google sheet.” In addition, those using the fact sheet function can download a more limited set of information using the export function within tableau