INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana will join a federal coronavirus program providing an additional $300 a week in unemployment benefits, although officials said Wednesday it could take up to a month for those payments to begin.
President Donald Trump this month signed an executive order extending the added weekly benefit after he and Congress were unable to agree to a broader new pandemic relief plan. The new payment is half the $600 people had been receiving under a previous benefit program that expired last month.
Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, at a Wednesday news conference, said the Indiana payments would be retroactive to August 1.
It took several weeks for distribution of the initial federal jobless aid to start in Indiana after Congress approved it in March following widespread business shutdowns as the COVID-19 outbreak hit the country.
Payments from the new program likely won't begin for two to four weeks as computer systems are updated, said Fred Payne, commissioner of Indiana's Department of Workforce Development.
"It is going to take a little bit of extra effort on our part in terms of moving staff to build a new system and that system requires us to look at some new infrastructure," Payne said.
The $300 payments will more than double Indiana's average $280 weekly unemployment payment, which has a maximum of $390 a week. Residents will have to be receiving $100 a week in unemployment aid to be eligible for the additional federal aid, a level which Indiana officials said the vast majority of those aid recipients currently met.
Indiana was paying unemployment benefits to about 330,000 people in late July, according to federal statistics.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has said the additional funding may last roughly five or six weeks depending on how many states participate. Indiana's unemployment rate was 11.3 in June - down from 17.5% in April.
Reporter Tom Davies of the Associated Press wrote this story.
Watch the governor news conference below in the video player below:
