Record Setting June: OED Awards $1 Billion in Unemployment Insurance Benefits and Makes 1 Million+ Payments.

The much criticized Oregon Department Employment Department in June set new unemployment insurance records that were staggering in scale. 

OEC sent to Oregonians more than $1 Billion in benefits and made nearly 1.12 million payments. 
 
In one month, that's more than 2 and 1/4 times the $430 million TOTAL Oregon UI amount paid in ALL of CY 2019 and 100,000+ more payments than were made in CY 2019 (1.07M).
  
So, every day in June, OED sent out an average of $33+ million in UI benefits and made an average of 37,000+ payments.

The PDF HERE and embedded below has two graphs showing details by month for 2020, through June:

1. The number of benefit payments made and the dollar amount of those benefits. 
2. The average payment (dividing total number of payments made). 

Note that:
Payments and benefits shown include ALL Unemployment Insurance programs (Regular, PUA, Workshare, FPEUC, EB, and FPUC [the $600 supplement]). Programs other than Regular Insurance were important as DOL data shows in June that Regular Insurance payments were only $313 million of the $1 billion total reported by OED.

In April the $600 FPUC UI supplement kicked in. 
In the PDF second page/graph the average payment (analogous to the weekly benefit average) was $406 in March but increased to $905 in June. 

Loss of $600 Supplement Will Cut UI by 60%+, Starting NOW.
Unfortunately, with the $600 [FPUC] supplement not yet renewed that means starting July 26 weekly checks will be reduced by more than 60%, likely averaging near or below the average Oregon WBA for ONLY Regular Unemployment insurance level-- $362 in June.

The June OED report with payment data used for this post is HERE.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.