Claiming allowance

The daily allowance must be applied for within 3 months of the date from which the daily allowance is to be paid. If your application is about to expire because you are unable to compile the necessary attachments, you can send your application incomplete and complete it later.

Waiting for the statement from the employment authority or waiting for attachments from the employer, are not such a particularly compelling reasons, that the daily allowance could be paid despite the delay in the application.

Claims for benefit are always made retroactively. 

Submit your first application for daily allowance via eService after you have been laid-off for two weeks. 

Exceptions:

• If your lay off lasts less than two weeks, you can send an application as soon as your unemployment ends.
• If your unemployment lasts less than one month, apply for daily allowance for the whole period in one go. 
   

If you have been laid off by shortening your working week (i.e. you are not laid off for a full week), you must always fill in the application form for the entire calendar week (Mon – Sun).

Exampel: You have been laid off from Tuesday to Thursday. The lay-off doesn´t last a full calendar week, so it is considered a lay-off for a shortened work week. Fill in the application from Monday until Sunday. You can send the application to the fund no earlier than Sunday.

If your lay-off continues, you can apply for a daily allowance 

• in periods of four calendar weeks (Monday to Sunday), or
• monthly (according to the calendar month or, for example, from the 10th of the current month to the 9th of the next month).

If you are laid off full-time and the last weekday of your first application was a Sunday, the fund, as a rule, marks the rhythm of follow-up applications as 4 weeks. In other case, the rhythm is marked as monthly.

If you are not fully laid off but your working hours have been reduced due to a layoff, or if you work for an employer other than the one that laid you off during the layoff period, the application schedule for the daily allowance will follow your pay cycle:

• If your salary is paid once or twice a month (for example 15. and 31. day of the month), send applications monthly.
• If your salary is paid every two or four weeks, send applications in periods of 4 weeks.

Always complete your application for a full calendar week (Monday to Sunday) if your layoff has been implemented by reducing your weekly working hours (i.e., you are only laid off on certain days rather than for the entire calendar week). In cases of reduced working weeks, working hours are assessed on a calendar-week basis. Therefore, we require information on all hours worked during the entire week, even if your application period starts or ends in the middle of the week.

If you work during lay-off, please note the following:

• In your application, please report the hours worked for each employer separately. Do not round off your working time to the nearest hour or half hour.
• In your application, please indicate any paid days off, such as midweek public holidays and holidays.
• In your application, please also indicate any unpaid days of absence. 

We need information on the hours worked, for example to calculate the mandatory waiting period and to check the working time limit for adjusted daily allowance. We also need the information to decide whether you are entitled to a benefit. You are not entitled to daily allowance for a day of unpaid absence taken at your own request.

We process daily allowance applications in the order in which they are received. It is not possible to rush the process.

We provide information on the current status of processing on the front page of the Fund’s website. In the tracking of application processing, you can see the date of receipt of the oldest application for which processing has not yet started.

If your application is incomplete or we need more information in order to process your application, we will contact you once the processing of your application has started. We can only complete your application once we have received all the additional information we need. We will only ask for additional information that is necessary to process your application.

The Fund will contact you primarily by means of a message sent via the electronic service channel (eService). However, remember to check the contact details you have provided to the Fund in eService under My details – Contact details. If your contact details have changed, please save the changes in the service.

Once the Fund has received your application, you can track its progress in eService. For example, if your application’s status is “waiting for a third party”, we are waiting for further information from the employment authority, Kela or the employer directly.