How much does unemployment pay in Louisiana?

Your weekly payment is worked out from wages your employers already reported, so a raise or a job you started since then does not lift it.

How your weekly amount is worked out

1. Louisiana Works adds up the wages reported for the 4 quarters of your base period.
2. It takes the average of those wages and divides it by 25.
3. If that does not land on a whole dollar, it is cut down to the whole dollar below, never up.
4. The result cannot be less than $35, and it cannot be more than $282.

That formula runs once your base period wages reach $1,200. Below that figure the claim does not qualify on wages, so no weekly amount is worked out.

Which wages your amount comes from

Your base period is the first 4 of the last 5 completed calendar quarters before you filed, which leaves out the quarter you are in and the one before it.

Louisiana Works gives this example: file in December 2025, and the wages used run from July 2024 through June 2025.

To qualify on wages you need at least $1,200 in total base period wages, and total wages of at least 1.5 times what you earned in your highest quarter. The agency's own example: a high quarter of $3,000 needs total wages of $4,500 or more. The rest of the test is on who qualifies.

Partial unemployment and part-time work

A week when you worked part-time can still pay. You can earn up to 50% of your weekly benefit amount with no reduction at all, and every dollar above that is subtracted from the benefit dollar for dollar.

Earn as much as your weekly benefit amount, or more, and that week pays nothing. If that happens 3 weeks in a row, stop filing. How to report a week's earnings is on weekly claims and work search.

What can cut or stop a payment

Louisiana law says you cannot get benefits while you are receiving other payments, such as vacation pay, severance, a pension that is not Social Security, or workers' compensation. You have to report any payment you receive or expect from an employer, bonuses included.

Severance can also cut the number of weeks a claim runs, which is on how long benefits last.

Money you owe from an earlier overpayment is handled on denials, appeals, and overpayments.

Why the $282 ceiling moves

The maximum weekly benefit is tied to the balance of the state unemployment trust fund. Each September the Revenue Estimating Conference adopts an official projection of that balance for the next calendar year, and a table in the law turns that projection into the year's maximum weekly benefit and the maximum wages an employer is taxed on.

The number of weeks a claim can pay is set by something else, the state's average unemployment rate, on a separate table. Each ceiling moves on its own schedule, and one can change in a year the other does not.

If the amount looks wrong

If anything on your monetary determination is missing or wrong, you can ask for a redetermination. Your HiRE account is the fastest way to do it.

You can also complete the section on the determination itself and send it, with proof such as pay stubs or payroll records, to BAT_Adjustments@la.gov, or by fax to 225-219-1834.

Whichever way you ask, keep filing your weekly claims the whole time the review runs. Louisiana Works warns that someone who stops filing may not be paid for those weeks even after the wages are put right.

A copy of the wage records behind the figure has to be asked for in writing. Post a request giving your Social Security number, your name, and a return address to the Unemployment Insurance Custodian of Records, Louisiana Works, Room 390, P.O. Box 44094, Baton Rouge, LA 70804-9094. Call (225) 342-3018 for more about that request, not to place it.