In the past, if you were not a W2 employee and lost your job, you were not able to get any unemployment assistance. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, that has has now changed. Non-W2 workers may apply for Unemployment Insurance (UI). In California the EDD manages unemployment claims and today is the first day they are accepting UI claims for self-employed individuals.

For more information and to file your claim go here: https://edd.ca.gov/about_edd/coronavirus-2019/pandemic-unemployment-assistance.htm

Since today is the first day, the website is  going to be overwhelmed so please be patient.

Benefit Amounts

The provisions of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program include:

Benefits can be retroactive to weeks starting on or after February 2, 2020, depending on your last day of work due to COVID-19 and regardless of when you submitted your claim application. The effective date of your claim will begin the Sunday of the week when you last worked and became unemployed due to reasons directly related to COVID-19.

Eligibility

The PUA benefits are payable if you don’t qualify for regular Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits in California or another state and also do not qualify for state Disability Insurance or Paid Family Leave benefits. This includes:

You can also be eligible if you qualified for regular UI benefits, but have already collected all of those benefits.

If you are not a US citizen, you can only be paid PUA benefits if you were legally working in the US when you were affected by COVID-19. You can only claim benefits for the weeks that you were legally allowed to work.

You must also meet one of the following criteria:

Info you need to apply:

 

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