DALLAS — Reminder: If you are receiving unemployment in Texas, you are getting a pay cut later this week. Gov. Greg Abbott is pulling Texas out of the federal $300 weekly benefit on June 26.
Some on unemployment will lose $300 per week. Others will lose their entire weekly payment. That includes people who are getting unemployment only because of expanded eligibility under federal pandemic programs and those who are now getting federal additional weeks of benefits. The Texas Workforce Commission confirms:
“The governor has announced that on June 26, 2021, Texas will stop participating in ARPA programs, including Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the Mixed Earners Unemployment Compensation Program (MEUC)."
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The payment cutoffs will affect hundreds of thousands of Texans. In the most recent numbers on May 29 from the Department of Labor, 582,119 in Texas were getting benefits just under the PEUC, which offers additional weeks of unemployment to augment the weeks of regular state benefits. Another 373,496 were getting benefits under PUA, which expands eligibility to unemployment benefits to people not covered under the state unemployment system.
The extra $300 weekly unemployment payments approved by Congress and President Joe Biden is scheduled to last into September. But Abbott says plenty of jobs are available in Texas, so he is canceling the extra federal money early in order to push more people to get back to work.
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It’s unclear if that will happen so easily. Career platform Indeed recently found that in some states where the federal payments were about to be ended early, the number of job searches actually declined.
If you are planning to search, Indeed also found that job postings in D-FW are up 33.7% from the number of openings just before the pandemic.