by Jordan Wolman and Chris Lisinski
CommonWealth Beacon

Despite improvement, Mass. unemployment system remains one of the worst in the country by some measures

NEW DATA FROM the Massachusetts unemployment insurance system shows how far the agency’s performance came in the final two months of 2025 — and how far it still has to go to climb out of its place near the bottom of the national rankings.

The state’s Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA) issued nearly 74 percent of initial payments to eligible claimants within 35 days in December, up from just 49 percent in October, according to new data that CommonWealth Beacon obtained via public records request.

That’s an improvement of 25 percentage points within two months, but it still ranks among the slowest in the country in distributing the benefits and remains far below federal benchmarks.

In the meantime, the leadership on Beacon Hill has remained largely silent on the months-long upheaval that pushed Massachusetts to become the worst performer in the nation for much of 2025.

While rank-and-file lawmakers report a surge in calls from constituents who waited weeks or months for jobless aid, legislative leaders have either declined to comment about the situation or sent one-line statements, and the heads of the House and Senate oversight committees did not respond to requests for comment.

The latest data provides a more complete picture of how the Massachusetts unemployment insurance system fared in 2025. After a major overhaul in May that sought to improve accessibility to the platform on phones and in multiple languages and boost fraud prevention tools, an initiative that won Gov. Maura Healey’s praises for promising to turn Massachusetts into a “top performing state” for the delivery of jobless benefits, the system cratered to an all-time low.

“We did notice that there were significant challenges that we had to address head on, which is exactly what we have been doing, and we will continue to punch through to ensure that eligible claimants are able to receive their benefits and receive their benefits timely,” Labor and Workforce Development Secretary Lauren Jones, who oversees the state’s unemployment system, said in an interview. “We're trying to think creatively. The governor calls for us to think efficiently as well, and we're doing exactly that, and we're continuing to stay focused on it and will continue as we move forward in this year, knowing how important improving customer service is.”

In each month between June and October, immediately after the system overhaul in May, at least 4 in 10 new unemployment claims filed in Massachusetts by eligible workers went unpaid for 35 days or longer, according to federal data.

By that measure, Massachusetts posted some of its worst-performing months in state history and was the slowest state in the nation in issuing benefits over that span. A tax on Bay State businesses funds the jobless benefits, which are some of the most generous in the country.

Payments began moving more quickly in November, the newly released data show. That month, Massachusetts distributed aid to about 65 percent of initial claimants within 35 days.

In December, that rate rose again to 74 percent, the highest that metric has been since April, which was prior to the launch of the new system. However, it’s still about 20 points shy of the national average and a federal performance benchmark that calls on states to administer 93 percent of initial payments within 35 days.

Jones said that the new system replaced an “archaic, broken” one and is a modernized platform that is in fact working. But she acknowledged that there’s been a “learning curve” for agency staff. Questions that staff need to sort through on a claimant’s application to determine eligibility look differently under the new system compared with the old one, for instance.

“Did that cause some challenges? Yes, it did,” Jones said. “And did we work through those? Absolutely.”

DUA is also hiring additional adjudicators and seasonal staff to help process claims and manage the call center and extended a pilot program the agency credits for helping workers move through claims.

Healey, when asked about the situation last month, said that Jones “has done a great job with reforms and staffing new systems.”

“As you might remember when I began as governor, there was a system where they did things that ended up costing the state billions of dollars,” Healey said, referencing a blunder under former Gov. Charlie Baker where the state erroneously used federal pandemic funds to cover unemployment benefits that should have been paid with state dollars. “And we worked hard immediately under Secretary Jones's leadership to fix that.”

CommonWealth Beacon requested data about how timely the system made payments in November and December because it’s still missing from a public federal database. As of Wednesday morning, Massachusetts is the only state without November data posted there, and one of three without December data.

The state’s Department of Unemployment Assistance maintains that it submitted its data to the US Department of Labor and doesn’t know why it isn’t yet posted. US Labor officials didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

Other metrics show the state’s system is continuing to struggle in areas crucial for administering benefits and resolving issues quickly.

The state’s already-dismal recent record on resolving issues pertaining to an employee’s separation from their employer actually got worse in December. Roughly 11 percent of these decisions were made within 21 days after that number had improved slightly in both October and November.

The federal performance benchmarks call for 80 percent of these issues, once they’re detected, to be resolved within 21 days. Of the separation determinations made in December, just 44 percent were resolved within 70 days, according to DUA’s data provided to CommonWealth Beacon.

Even those numbers obscure mounting issues that transcend the typical increase in claims in winter months.

There are more than 70,000 issues pending as of Jan. 13, according to a second data request reviewed by CommonWealth Beacon. That’s a substantial jump from the fewer than 40,000 outstanding issues in April before the new system launched in May.

There were also more than 12,000 appeals pending a hearing decision this past December, nearly 9 times as many appeals pending decisions in December 2024.

That’s despite initial unemployment insurance claims in Massachusetts in 2025 falling to their lowest since 2019, according to federal data.

Hannah Tanabe, a senior attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, said in a statement that she’s “heartened” to see improvement in the timeliness of initial payments for November and December, but that overall, DUA “continues to lag far behind expected levels of performance.”

“These ongoing challenges — and the hardship they are causing claimants — show the need for DUA to identify and systemically address the underlying causes of these delays,” Tanabe said.

Ironically, a pair of newcomers to the State House have mounted the most robust response under the Golden Dome so far.

First-term Reps. Hadley Luddy and Josh Tarsky filed a bill on Jan. 20 — six days after CommonWealth Beacon’s initial story — that would create a special commission tasked with recommending how to fix “timeliness and equity issues in the processing of claims for unemployment insurance.”

“We’re just not convinced that the changes that have been made [at DUA] are substantial enough to really move the needle in the ways that we want it to be,” Tarsky, who represents Needham, Dover, and parts of Medfield, said in an interview. “That’s why we thought the commission was a good idea, to just look into it in a deeper way.”

Both representatives said they began to feel that something was amiss last year. New representatives and their aides typically work in a shared space known as “the bullpen” while awaiting office assignments, and they noticed they all were receiving an unexpectedly high volume of calls from constituents struggling to access unemployment benefits.

Most of the time, Luddy and Tarsky or their aides are able to help laid-off workers cut through the bureaucratic thicket. The lawmakers’ offices can contact liaisons at DUA, which often results in a case that’s been stalled for weeks or months suddenly moving.

They worry, however, about the impact of what Tarsky aide Kyle McGrath described as “survivorship bias.”

“I’m getting phone calls from people that know that they can reach out to their state rep. It gets handled within two weeks because I’m able to reach out to my liaison, and there's a process for it,” McGrath said. “But who are we missing? Who are those people that don’t know to reach out to us, that don’t know that they can reach out to their senator, whoever it might be? Because that’s who we're missing, and ideally, having the study, having a commission to look into this is going to find those gaps.”

The delays could also carry economic consequences, according to Luddy, who represents a Cape Cod district that traditionally relies on a surge in seasonal employment.

“If we can’t count on folks being able to receive their unemployment insurance in these off months, it has a huge impact on our businesses,” she said.

It’s not clear what path the bill will take or if it will earn enough support from legislative leaders — who have remained quiet on the issue — to advance.

CommonWealth Beacon asked aides to both House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka when they became aware of the problems paying claims in a timely fashion, if they are satisfied with how the Healey administration has responded to the upheaval, and if they believe the Legislature should be involved.

Mariano did not comment, and Spilka’s office responded with a one-sentence statement.

“Massachusetts has a strong commitment to supporting workers during periods of unemployment, and Senate President Spilka knows the administration is working to ensure the unemployment system serves residents effectively and with care,” a spokesperson said.

Occasionally, lawmakers will convene oversight hearings to probe a headline-grabbing problem in the executive branch, such as the safety problems at the MBTA that prompted federal intervention.

The House and Senate each have their own Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which at times host public sessions to probe an administration’s work. In the past year, the Senate panel led by Sen. Mark Montigny has questioned the T about service disruptions on the new South Coast Rail commuter rail extension, scheduled hearings to examine the highway service plaza kerfuffle that erupted when a losing bidder complained, and hosted a nearly two-hour session about commercial sea scallop fishing.

Neither Montigny nor his House counterpart, Rep. John Mahoney, responded to multiple inquiries about whether they feel the UI delays warrant attention by their committees.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the region that Rep. Hadley Luddy represents. Her district covers parts of Cape Cod.

This article first appeared on CommonWealth Beacon and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.