The Government is preparing a legislative amendment to stagger daily allowance. Staggering daily allowance means that the amount of daily allowance you receive would be reduced by 20% after 40 benefit days and 25% after 170 benefit days.
Staggered daily allowance would apply to individuals whose daily allowance calculation includes pay for work done from 2 September 2024 onwards. However, the change would not apply to daily allowance periods that have started before the amendment comes into effect.
In practice, the change would not affect benefits until November at the earliest, once the first people covered by staggered daily allowance have collected 40 benefit days.
Partially employed people would also be affected slightly later than others. This is because partially employed people collect benefit days at a slower rate.
The change would also affect people who are covered by staggered daily allowance and are on additional days of earnings-related unemployment allowance, partially employed or receiving entrepreneur’s earnings-related unemployment allowance.
Staggering would cut earnings-related unemployment allowance by hundreds of Euros in all income brackets:
| Wages before unemployment | Full earnings-related unemployment allowance | Impact of 20% reduction | Impact of 25% reduction |
| 1 500 € | 1 090 € | – 218 € | – 272 € |
| 2 000 € | 1 306 € | – 261 € | – 327 € |
| 2 500 € | 1 523 € | – 305 € | – 381 € |
| 3 000 € | 1 739 € | – 348 € | – 435 € |
| 3 500 € | 1 956 € | – 391 € | – 489 € |
| 4 000 € | 2 094 € | – 419 € | – 523 € |
Read more about the changes to unemployment security in 2024 on the summary page Changes to unemployment security in 2024