The working condition will change

The working condition will change from the beginning of September. In the future, only the amount of salary will affect the accumulation of the working condition, while the length of the working condition will increase from 6 to 12 months.

Working condition

You can only get income-related daily allowance if you have been working steadily before becoming unemployed. This condition is called the working condition.

After the change at the beginning of September, the working condition is met if you have worked for at least 12 months in the 28 months before unemployment.

You will accumulate one month of working condition for every calendar month during which you have been paid at least 930 €.

Your working condition also accumulates to one month from two separate calendar months during which you were paid at least 465 € each month.

All statutory contributions and taxes must have been paid on your salary. In addition, we can only accept wages that are in line with the collective agreement. If there is no collective agreement in the sector, the full-time salary must be at least 1 399 €. It is therefore possible that your salary exceeds the threshold of 930 € per month for the accumulation of working condition, but it is below the minimum wage specified in the collective agreement or by law, in which case the working condition will not be accumulated even if the threshold of the minimum wage is exceeded.

The change in the working condition

	Until 1.9.2024	Starting 2.9.2024
Working condition	26 calendar weeks	12 working condition months
Accumulation	Work for at least 18 h / week	Salary at least 930 € / month Salary at least 465 € / half a month
Membership condition	26 weeks	12 months
Pay subsidy	Accumulates 75 %	Does not accumulate, some exceptions

1. The main change is that you will have to work longer to collect the right to earnings-related daily allowance. Before the change in the law, you needed about 6 months to get your earnings-related daily allowance right; after the change in the law, you will need 12 months.
2. With a very low income, you may not be able to collect the working condition, even if you worked enough hours in the past.
3. If your income is sufficient, you can use unevenly distributed work to collect working conditions in situations where you could not do so in the past.
4. If your income is high, you can collect working conditions with fewer hours than before.
5. Unlike in the past, we will count the work towards the working condition on a pay basis, i.e. it will be allocated to the month in which the salary was paid, regardless of when the work was done.
6. The application of the earnings-related daily allowance is not affected by the change.
7. The amount of the daily allowance will not be affected to any great extent.

Transition to the new

Accumulation of working conditions after the change

We will apply the new working condition from 2.9.2024, when we can count at least one or half a month towards your working condition.

After the change, the working condition will be met on a payment basis according to the salary payment date. Within a month, the date of payment of the salary is irrelevant. You will accumulate one calendar month if you are paid a qualifying salary of at least 930 € during the month. You will also accumulate one month if you are paid at least 465 € in each of two separate calendar months.

Payment basis

We take into account the date of payment for the working condition. For example, if you worked in September but your salary is not paid until October, you will accumulate working condition from October. So we will treat your salary as paid for the month in which it was paid, regardless of when the work was done.

We may deviate from the payment basis if the employer pays salary for a period of more than one month at a time, in deviation from the normal payment of salary, or if the employer is responsible for the delay in payment of salary.

Another exception to the payment basis is the transition from the old to the new. We will take into account the salary earned in August 2024 but paid in September 2024 on an earnings basis for August.

The working condition is met when you have accumulated a total of 12 months of working time in 28 months.

You can also accumulate the full working condition in half months, which means that it takes 24 months to accumulate 12 months of working condition.

The months or half-months of working condition do not have to be consecutive.

Taking into account a previous working condition

If you are covered by the 12-month working condition and your working condition is not fully met from 2.9.2024, we can also count the time you have accumulated in the past towards your working condition. In this case, we will convert the weeks previously accumulated towards the working condition into months according to the new model. This means that you do not have to accumulate all your working condition either before 2.9.2024 or only after 2.9.2024, but a combination is also possible.

We will convert the working condition accumulated in the previous weeks so that 1-2 weeks of working condition correspond to one half month of working condition. 3-4 weeks of working condition correspond to one full month of working condition. We therefore multiply the number of weeks by 4 and round up the remainder to the nearest half or full month of working time.