Unemployment, disability and paid family leave: what your state pays a week

Three programs, three formulas, one pay

Losing a job, falling ill and welcoming a child are three different claims, filed with three different offices in most states, and each one reads your wages its own way. Unemployment in Texas pays one twenty-fifth of your best quarter; Washington paid leave pays 90% of your weekly wage up to half the state average and half of the rest; California disability pays 90% or 70% of the best quarter divided by thirteen. A person who reads all three pages still has three numbers that do not compare.

This site stores each formula as the state wrote it: the share of the best quarter or of the two best quarters, the floor and the cap for 2026, the share of yearly pay that limits the total, the weeks. For unemployment, the source is the table the U.S. Department of Labor publishes twice a year for all states, in its edition effective July 2026 (Significant Provisions of State UI Laws), updated where a state has raised its cap since. For paid leave and disability, it is the agency's own page or the statute, read on October 20, 2026. The method page lists what each figure rests on and where the engine simplifies.

A week of benefit against a week of pay

No benefit replaces a full paycheck, and the gap depends more on the cap than on the rate. At $52,000 a year, a single filer in California takes home about $832 a week after federal income tax, Social Security, Medicare and the state disability premium; unemployment at $450 replaces 54 % of it before tax, family leave at $900 replaces 108 %. Above the cap, every extra dollar of salary widens the gap: a Massachusetts claimant can draw up to $1,154 a week of unemployment, a Florida claimant $275.

Federal income tax applies to unemployment (IRS Topic 418) and, since 2025, to state family leave benefits (Revenue Ruling 2025-4). Nothing is withheld unless you ask for the flat 10% with Form W-4V; the tax page estimates what is left to pay in April.

What changed in 2026

Minnesota Paid Leave started paying on January 1, 2026; Delaware Paid Leave started paying on January 1, 2026; Maine Paid Family and Medical Leave started paying on May 1, 2026. Maryland Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) is still to come: contributions start on January 1, 2027 and benefits on January 1, 2028, with weekly amounts not yet published. Massachusetts raised its unemployment cap to $1,154 for benefit years from October 4, 2026, and Washington's paid leave cap of $1,647 is set to move again in January.

What these estimates are not

They are the state's formula applied to the pay you type, not the agency's decision. The agency reads the wages your employers reported for a base period that usually ends three to six months before the claim, checks why you left, and may pay a dependents' allowance or a different number of weeks when its unemployment rate moves. The 49 unemployment formulas computed here leave out Alaska and Virginia, which set the amount in a wage table written into their law.