About this guide

New Jersey pays unemployment, temporary disability, and family leave benefits through separate divisions, and the program you claim under decides which of them answers you. This guide follows all of them, and for anything you have to do yourself it sends you to the page NJDOL publishes for it.

Each guide here takes one question: filing a claim, who qualifies, what a week pays, how many weeks a claim holds, certifying for each week you want paid, a denial or an overpayment notice, tax, the phone lines and the career centers, disability and family leave, and looking for work again.

Every rate, deadline, phone number, and link to a government page is read off the official page it came from, and the date of the last reading sits at the foot of each guide. The programs here share names without sharing rates, so each figure is written beside the program and the year it belongs to. New Jersey sets new maximums each year, and the pages carrying them are rewritten when it does.

What this guide cannot do is see your claim, change it, or decide whether you qualify. Only NJDOL does any of that, through whichever of its divisions runs the program you claimed under. Nothing here is legal advice either. NJDOL's own glossary says to seek the advice of an attorney if you need legal assistance, and denials, appeals, and overpayments names the free legal services a claimant can ask to be represented by.

To reach the Department, contact sets out the routes in, and offices and phone numbers has the claims lines and the One-Stop Career Centers. Its own site for claimants is the Division of Unemployment Insurance.