If you fall ill while you are unemployed or laid-off, your illness may affect your unemployment allowance.
Report your illness to the fund in your allowance application. If your sick leave continues longer than the period you are sending the application, report in the details of the application when your sick leave ends.
Example: You are sending an application for the month of March, but your sick leave ends on April 15th. Report the ending date of your sick leave in the applications details.
If your sick leave lasts under 10 days, you can receive unemployment allowance for the entire duration of your illness. Nevertheless, report your sick days in your allowance application.
If you have visited a doctor and you have a medical certificate for a sick leave that lasts more than 10 days, you should apply for sickness allowance from Kela. If you work part-time and are entitled to paid sick leave, your employer can apply for the sickness allowance.
The sickness allowance is paid after a waiting period, that lasts the day you became ill and the next 9 weekdays. Kela counts also Saturdays as weekdays, but not public holidays. If you have been receiving unemployment allowance when you became ill, the fund will pay you unemployment allowance for the waiting period of the sickness allowance.
You can't claim sickness allowance and unemployment allowance for the same time and sickness allowance always takes precedence over unemployment allowance. This means that if sickness allowance is paid for a period for which you have already received unemployment allowance, your unemployment allowance will have to be paid back.
If you have been on sick leave for over 300 days and your right to sickness allowance from Kela has ended, you should apply for a disability pension.
If a decision on your pension application is delayed, you can register with the TE Office as an unemployed jobseeker and apply for unemployment allowance even if your employment contract is still valid.
To receive unemployment allowance, the following conditions must be met:
Read more about the conditions for claiming allowance https://www.tehytk.fi/en/abc-unemployment/claiming-allowance
If the pension is granted retrospectively, the pension institution pays the pension to the fund for the period for which unemployment allowance has already been paid. If the pension is smaller than your unemployment allowance, you don't have to paid the difference back to the fund.
If you have been a jobseeker with TE Office for a year after the maximum payment period of sickness allowance (300 days) ran out, you may get a new right to sickness allowance.
If you are still ill, after being a jobseeker for a year, you must contact Kela yourself to see if you get a new right to sickness allowance. Kela cannot know which of those who have received unemployment allowance are still ill.
