Amount and payment of allowance

The daily allowance consists of the following components

• basic component, which is 37,21 euros per day (from 1.1.2023 onwards).
• earnings-related component, which depends on your salary. 

No index increase will be made during the years 2024 – 2027, so the amount of basic component will remain the same as in 2023.

When you participate in employment promoting services you can receive tax free compensation for expenses. Compensation is paid for all employment promoting services except independent study.

Compensation for expenses is 9 euros per day, and it is paid for a maximum of 5 days a week.

The compensation for expenses is paid at an increased rate if you participate in employment promoting measures outside your commuting area. The increased rate can also be paid if the services are organised within your commuting area but outside your home municipality, and you must pay for accommodation.

The increased rate of the compensation is 18 euros per day.

The daily allowance is paid in full for the first 40 days of unemployment after the employment condition has been fulfilled. After that, the benefit amount decreases to 80% of the original full daily allowance. Additionally, the benefit is reduced again after a total of 170 days of unemployment, at which point the daily allowance drops to 75% of the original amount. 40 days corresponds to about two months, and 170 days to about eight months.

You can use the daily allowance calculator to estimate your daily allowance amount after the reductions.

Here are some examples of the impact of the graduated reduction on different levels of daily allowance.

If you receive salary or social benefits that are taken into account in your daily allowance (i.e. you therefore receive an adjusted or reduced daily allowance), the graduated reduction will lower the full daily allowance on which the adjustment or reduction is based on. Therefore, the reduction does not directly decrease, for example, the adjusted daily allowance, but instead affects the full earnings-related daily allowance from which the adjusted daily allowance is calculated. However, the reduced daily allowance has a lower limit which means that earnings-related daily allowance is always paid at least to the level of the basic daily allowance.

If the earnings-related daily allowance is paid as adjusted, the number of unemployment days in the graduated reduction calculator accumulates more slowly than if the earnings-related daily allowance were paid as a full unemployment daily allowance. The adjusted daily allowance is converted, based on its amount, into full daily allowance days that accumulate towards the 40 and 170-day graduated reduction counts. 

The amount of the daily allowance is recalculated if you fulfill the employment condition again.