Chart: Congressional decisions after the Great Recession led to cutoffs of UI aid with unemployment still elevated: Number of states that did not but would have offered extended potential benefit durations to unemployed workers whose benefits triggered off only when unemployment fell to 6%, 5.5% and 5% triggers.

Congressional decisions after the Great Recession led to cutoffs of UI aid with unemployment still elevated: Number of states that did not but would have offered extended potential benefit durations to unemployed workers whose benefits triggered off only when unemployment fell to 6%, 5.5% and 5% triggers.

Date	5%	5.5%	6%
2014	37	33	27
2015	29	21	14
2016	21	11	7

Note: We examined how many states had unemployment rates higher than potential “trigger-off” thresholds of 5%, 5.5%, and 6% for the extended benefits durations.

Source: State unemployment rate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS 2021a).

View the underlying data on epi.org.