Who is eligible for unemployment benefits in Indiana?

An Indiana claim is judged on your wages first and on the reason your job ended second. The Department of Workforce Development looks at how much you worked in the 12 to 18 months before you filed, why you are no longer working for your past employers, and whether you are able, available, and actively seeking full-time work.

The wages you need in your base period

Your base period is the first 4 of the last 5 completed calendar quarters before the effective date of your claim. The wages your employers reported in those quarters have to clear both of Indiana's tests.

Clearing both tests establishes a claim. It does not settle whether the claim pays, which turns on why your job ended and on what you do each week. How much it pays works out what those wages are worth a week.

Why your job ended

Indiana weighs one separation only: the most recent one before you filed. It disqualifies you if you voluntarily left that work without good cause in connection with it, or if you were discharged from it for just cause, and the disqualification starts with the week the separation happened. A job you quit earlier in your base period is not the separation the rule looks at.

The statute defines discharge for just cause to include, without being limited to:

• falsifying an employment application to get the job through subterfuge
• knowingly breaking a reasonable and uniformly enforced employer rule, including a rule about attendance
• unsatisfactory attendance, where the employer has no attendance rule and there is no good cause for the absences
• damaging the employer's property through willful and wanton misconduct
• refusing to obey instructions
• conduct endangering the safety of yourself or your coworkers
• jail following conviction of a misdemeanor or felony
• any breach of a duty in connection with work that is reasonably owed to an employer

DWD's own plain-language summary of the same ground is shorter: quitting voluntarily without a good, work-related reason, being discharged for just cause, or being discharged for gross misconduct. Read the statute's list as the fuller one, since it names grounds the summary does not.

The statute also sets out separations that do not disqualify you. They include:

• leaving to take permanent full-time work you had already secured with another employer, which offered a reasonable expectation of continued covered employment and better wages or working conditions, and then working that job
• leaving one employer while staying with a second you worked for at the same time
• leaving to accept a recall from a base period employer
• leaving or being discharged because of circumstances directly caused by domestic or family violence
• being out of work because of a medically substantiated physical disability, where you made reasonable efforts to keep the job and the unemployment is involuntary
• leaving to enter the United States armed forces, or being retired under a compulsory retirement provision, whether it comes from a union contract or from any other plan or program, public or private
• being discharged for failing or refusing a COVID immunization, after asking your employer for an exemption and meeting the state's requirements for one

Accepting a voluntary buyout to resign or retire works the other way. It makes you ineligible for unemployment insurance unless you have a reverse seniority agreement.

Gross misconduct and your wage credits

Gross misconduct is a narrower term than just cause, and it costs more.

This is the most serious category the statute names, and it is not the same thing as an ordinary discharge: a discharge can be for just cause without being gross misconduct. The statute defines gross misconduct in connection with work, as DWD determines it by a preponderance of the evidence:

• a felony
• a Class A misdemeanor
• working or reporting for work intoxicated by alcohol or a controlled substance, or consuming either on the employer's premises without permission
• battery on another person on the employer's property or during working hours
• theft or embezzlement
• fraud

The statute does not stop at that list. If evidence is presented that an action or requirement of the employer may have caused the conduct behind the discharge, the conduct is not gross misconduct. Lawful conduct an employer has not otherwise prohibited is not gross misconduct either. Whether either limit covers what happened in your case is decided on the evidence in front of DWD, and this page cannot tell you which way that goes.

What a disqualification costs, and how to requalify

A first disqualifying separation costs you twice over. Benefits are held until you have worked again, and the maximum benefit amount of the claim is cut to 75% of what it was first determined to be. A second separation and a third cut the remaining maximum further.

You requalify by working. Indiana asks for wages from at least 8 weeks of employment, and those wages have to equal or exceed 8 times your weekly benefit amount. Both conditions have to be met, and how long benefits last covers what is left of the claim afterwards.

Being able, available, and looking for work

Your wages are checked once, when the claim is set up. Whether you are able to work, available for work, and actively seeking full-time work is judged for each week you claim.

DWD can also find you ineligible for a week if you refuse a suitable job offer, refuse or fail a pre-employment drug screening, fail to take part in a required re-employment program, or cannot show proof that you are searching for work the way DWD requires. The same goes for a week in which you are temporarily unable to work because of illness, injury, a leave of absence, or a suspension for work-related misconduct.

Part-time work does not end a claim by itself. Partial benefits can go to people whose current employer cuts their hours below a regular full-time work week, and to claimants who take a new part-time job, and both have to report their part-time wages on every weekly voucher. How much it pays sets out what a week of part-time earnings leaves you.

On-call and as-needed workers are judged week by week: they are not eligible for any week in which they receive pay or refuse work. Where the rules above do not settle your own case, the decision is DWD's to make on your record, and how to file is the route to getting one.

When your employer disputes the claim

Filing sends your former employer a Separating or Base Period Employer Notice, and an employer who disputes why the job ended has to protest that notice. An employer inside your base period can be charged up to 28% of what you earned there, so the answer matters to them as well as to you.

Being terminated by your last employer, or being eligible for severance or vacation pay when you separated, can each put an issue on your claim on its own. DWD weighs what both sides say, then issues a determination. Either side can appeal it, and denials, appeals, and overpayments covers the deadline and what a hearing is like.