Income and unemployment
You can receive earnings-related allowance in the event of unemployment or lay-off if your work requirement is met and you have been a member of PAM and the Unemployment Fund for the corresponding period. The work requirement defines how long an unemployed person or a laid-off person must have been employed and a member of the unemployment fund in order to be entitled to earnings-related allowance.
Employee's employment condition is 26 weeks for unemployment or lay off periods that start on January 1, 2021 or later. Working 26 weeks is required for the payment of earnings-related allowance. In other words, you can receive earnings-related if you have worked for a minimum of 6 months.
You can find more information on how to apply for earnings-related allowance on the Unemployment Fund's website.
On this page you will find answers to the questions below. To get to the answer, scroll down the page or click the question.
What support can you get if you are unemployed or laid off?
How do I claim earnings-related benefits?
How much is earnings-related benefit?
How long does it take before the money is in my account?
Waiting period and suspension period, what do they mean?
My work requirement is not met, even though I became unemployed/was laid off. What support can I get?
My income at the moment is not enough to live on. Can I get something like social assistance?
How does part-time work or unpaid leave affect the payment of earnings-related allowance?
Who can get sickness allowance on account of an infectious disease from KELA?
My insolvent employer has not paid me the wages and bonuses that would belong to me. What do I do, can I apply for pay coverage?
How does lay-off affect the unemployment security of a wage subsidy worker? What happens to someone in TE training or as a student?
What support can you get if you are unemployed or laid-off?
If you become unemployed or are laid off, you can claim unemployment allowance. This is claimed either from the unemployment fund or from Kela, depending on whether you are a member of an unemployment fund.
If you have been a member of PAM and the unemployment fund for a minimum of 26 weeks, you can claim earnings-related unemployment allowance, which is paid based on your earnings. Otherwise claim unemployment allowance from Kela. If, due to unemployment or being laid off, your income is not sufficient for basic needs such as accommodation and food, you can also apply for example general housing allowance or social assistance.
If you become unemployed or you are laid off, you need to register as an unemployed jobseeker with the TE office. You can find
N.B.! Only EU and EEA citizens can at the moment register as a jobseeker in the TE Office's online service.
If you are not a citizen of an EU or EEA country, you can register as an unemployed jobseeker using the TE Office's open online form, which does not require strong identification. The same form should also be used if you do not have online bank codes. Please note that the form does not work in an Internet Explorer web browser.
You can also contact the nearest TE office, which you can find here, and ask more about your registration.
You can receive earnings-related unemployment allowance during your lay-off if you meet all the conditions. If you are laid off entirely, you will get full allowance. If the lay-off is part-time, the allowance is adjusted.
How much is earnings-related benefit?
The amount of earnings-related benefit is determined by your taxable earned income in weeks meeting the work requirement (holiday bonus and holiday compensation are not included). You can find a calculator on the unemployment fund’s own online service, where you can estimate the amount of benefit. TYJ also has an allowance calculator. Earnings-related benefit is paid for five days a week.
My work requirement is not met, even though I became unemployed/was laid off. What support can I get?
You can claim labour market subsidy from Kela. This is designed for persons who are applying for jobs but can’t get basic or earnings-related unemployment allowance.
My income at the moment is not enough to live on. Can I get something like social assistance?
If the money you have coming in is not enough to live on, you can get social assistance. Social assistance is a last-resort financial benefit that is designed to secure a living for individuals and families. Getting social assistance depends on your income, assets and expenses. Due to the coronavirus epidemic, individuals’ assets are not taken into account for now. This means that you do not have to sell property that could be sold straight away.
You can get social assistance while waiting for a benefit, such as an unemployment allowance decision. In this case any social assistance paid may be recovered. Social assistance is always granted if your essential expenses are higher than your income. Not all expenses are eligible expenses for social assistance, however, or to be more precise basic social assistance.
Social assistance is divided into three components:
- Basic social assistance from Kela (N.B. An exception is Åland, where the social services office deals with the whole process of granting social assistance).
- Discretionary supplementary and preventive social assistance granted by municipal social services.
Kela basic social assistance is also divided into two components: a basic component (fixed amount), and an amount for other basic expenses (variable amount).
For example, the basic amount of social assistance for someone living alone is 504.06 euros a month in 2021. This generally covers expenses for food, clothes and minor expenses for health care and personal and domestic cleanliness, as well as use of local transport, a newspaper subscription, telephone and telecommunications use, hobbies and recreation and other similar expenses.
Other basic expenses taken into account to a reasonable extent in basic social assistance include for example housing expenses, health care expenses and home insurance. Due to the coronavirus epidemic housing expenses are temporarily taken into account based on actual costs.
Municipalities grant supplementary social assistance for specific expenses, such as children’s materials and hobbies as well as furniture. Preventive social assistance, on the other hand, is granted to promote the social safety and autonomy of the individual and the family. This means that assistance may be granted in situations where there is no entitlement to basic or supplementary social assistance. Assistance can be granted based on municipalities’ guidelines and discretion, for example for over-indebtedness, to relieve hardship caused by a sudden financial setback or other housing expenses that Kela does not include in basic social assistance, such as charges for financial costs for property owners.
First apply for basic social assistance from Kela. If Kela rejects your application or if the assistance granted is not enough, then depending on your expenses you can apply to the municipal social services office for supplementary or preventive social assistance.
You can also apply for municipal social assistance in the Kela basic social assistance application. Then Kela transfers the application to the municipality for processing. Kela does not transfer an application, however, if they assess that a rejected expenditure item comes under basic social assistance. In this case you must apply to the municipal social services office for social assistance yourself.
By law Kela must process basic social assistance applications within 7 working days of all the required attachments being provided. Therefore you should check what attachments Kela needs and send them at the same time as the application.
By law Kela must process urgent applications the same day or no later than the following day. The same processing times also apply to municipal social assistance applications.
You can apply for basic social assistance online using Kela’s e-services or by mailing the form to KELA, PO Box 10, 00056 KELA. You can print the application here.
You can also apply for municipal social assistance online on the municipality’s own website. If for some reason you can’t find it, call the social services office in your municipality and ask for advice.
You can get more information on the Kela website on what expenses you can get basic social assistance for.
How does part-time work or unpaid leave affect the payment of earnings-related allowance?
Part-time workers who receive an adjusted earnings-related allowance should also be laid off if the employer does not have a job to offer. For months that a laid off part-time worker isn't paid any salary, the allowance can be paid in full. Any income paid during the application period will be adjusted.
The TE Office and the Unemployment Fund must be notified of the of the start and end of the lay off as well as of any other changes to the worker's situation. Layoffs can also be part-time. If the lay-off is not full-time but has been done by reducing the weekly or daily working hours, the hours worked must be entered in the allowance application. Salary information from the Unemployment Fund is available from the income register. Read more here.
There is no entitlement to earnings-related allowance for unpaid leave (e.g. family leave or study leave).
Who can get sickness allowance on account of an infectious disease from Kela?
You can get sickness allowance on account of an infectious disease from Kela if you or your child falls ill with coronavirus and a decision has been taken by the physician in charge of infectious disease responsible for the municipality or hospital district to place you in quarantine or isolation.
My insolvent employer has not paid me the wages and bonuses that would belong to me. What do I do, can I apply for pay coverage?
If your employer is bankrupt or otherwise insolvent, you can apply for missing wages as a wage guarantee. Payroll security is a claim for an employee's employment relationship, the basis and amount of which have been determined. The payroll authority is the Center for Economic Affairs, Transport and the Environment (ELY Center). Read more about filing for pay security here.
More advice on pay security is also found in this news.
How does lay-off affect the unemployment security of a wage subsidy worker? What happens to someone in TE training or as a student?
If the wage-subsidized job has fulfilled the work requirement again, you are entitled to a new period of earnings-related allowance. On the other hand, if the work requirement has not been met in a wage-subsidized job, you are not entitled to a new earnings-related allowance.
In a wage-subsidized job, fulfilling the work requirement requires more working weeks than in a normal employment relationship, because in a wage-subsidized job, only 75 per cent of your working time is counted in the employment condition. Thus, 26 working weeks are normally required to fulfill the work requirement, while at least 35 working weeks are required for wage-subsidized work. If you have completed 35 working weeks, you are entitled to a new period of earnings-related allowance.
In the case of students or the unemployed who have participated in the training organized by the TE Office, the livelihood will continue as before, but the changed situation must be reported to both the TE Office and PAM's Unemployment Fund.
More information:
PAM unemployment fund
PAM unemployment fund e-services (unemployment fund, log in on the Suomi.fi identification service with your online banking codes or mobile key)
Other forms of social assistance via KELA