L&I says $300 FPUC payments start arriving next week

Jennifer Berrier, the state’s acting Labor & Industry secretary, said eligible residents should start to receive Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation benefits again next week.
Berrier announced the pending arrival of the $300 weekly payments in a news release Friday afternoon. FPUC, which ended in late July, was reauthorized as part of the federal stimulus package that Congress passed a few weeks ago.
The program provides $300 per week to an eligible claimant on top of the weekly benefit amount he or she receives from certain other UC programs.
The secretary said in a prepared statement: “This boost … is vital to hard-working Pennsylvania families who have lost their income as a result of the global pandemic. I am pleased that L&I was able to work with the federal Department of Labor to get the information needed to quickly restart this program.”
Claimants do not have to apply for the benefits, which will be automatically added. Berrier said an estimated 127,000 claimants in the Unemployment Compensation and Extended Benefits programs will receive the first of these $300 payments as early as Tuesday. They will be for claim weeks ending Jan. 2, 2021, to March 13 – at no cost to the state’s Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.
She said L&I is awaiting information from the Labor Department on the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance programs. PEUC and PUA ended at the end of the year, but will resume as part of the federal CARES Act extension. Those programs have supported more than 500,000 Pennsylvanians.
When those payments resume, L&I will backdate eligible claims to the week of Jan. 2 and add the FPUC to ensure claimants do not miss any eligible weeks.