More Than a Year Into the Pandemic, Some Unemployment Benefits Are Still Being Delayed

In fact, many people wound up in a dire situation in March and April of 2020 when they not only lost their jobs, but faced delays in getting their unemployment benefits due to crashing, overwhelmed filing systems. It's estimated that about 38% of workers who received their first unemployment payments in June had waited more than 21 days for that money to arrive, according to data from the Labor Department. As a point of comparison, in January of 2020, before the pandemic, only about 7% of beneficiaries had to wait more than three weeks for their first unemployment payment.