The Trump administration wants to make it harder for Americans to receive unemployment benefits, proposing steeper job search requirements.
The Labor Department’s proposed rule, published in the federal register Tuesday, would set a national standard for what counts as “actively seeking work”: five documented unique work searches per week. Previously, the federal government mandated Americans be actively seeking a job to be eligible for unemployment benefits, but it never specified a number of job searches.
Most states require fewer than five searches per week. Of the roughly 100 million weeks of benefits claimed in 2025, about 3 million were in states already requiring five. Nearly half of states require three job searching activities a week.
Unemployment benefits advocates are warning that if the proposed rule is adopted, it could adversely impact people in more rural areas who don’t have access to as many job opportunities and could increase the administrative burden on states.
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“The problem is five distinct things every week that fit under this rule just sometimes isn’t going to be available,” said Michele Evermore, the senior director at the National Employment Law Project who worked on unemployment policy at Labor during the Biden administration. “After a couple of weeks you might have run through every potential opportunity that you had.”
Evermore said the weekly reporting is defensible, but not the number of reports. The proposed rule allows states to exempt claimants on jury duty, those hospitalized for emergencies and federal employees idled by a shutdown. It makes no exception for rural areas or thin labor markets.
She pointed to Florida, which already requires five searches a week under what Evermore called “one of the most draconian” unemployment laws in the country. Even there, she said, the state acknowledges that Americans in rural areas may not be able to do five.
Nicole Salk, senior staff attorney at Brooklyn Legal Services who has represented claimants for about 20 years, said the proposed rule is “punitive rather than effective.” The reporting requirement, she said, shifts the emphasis to whether a claimant files correctly rather than whether they searched, and falls hardest on lower-wage workers, people less tech-savvy and non-English speakers.
The Labor Department projected the change would cut benefit payments by up to $7.3 billion a year. Because that money would remain in state unemployment trust funds, the Trump administration says the money not paid to workers is not “a reduction in total resources available to society.”
“This proposed rule helps job-seekers find work faster and ensures efficient use of taxpayer resources while improving the overall integrity of our unemployment system,” Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said in the department’s announcement.
The administration estimated a one-time cost of about $24,000 for state and territorial agencies to read the rule. The Labor Department did not estimate what compliance would cost states administratively.
It estimated the rule would also add 133.5 million hours of job searching by claimants a year.
The proposed rule would require claimants to “report the details of each completed work search activity” at weekly certification before the states release payment. Currently, some states only require benefit seekers to keep their own logs and produce them only if the state audits them.
Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who studies work requirements across safety net programs, said there is solid evidence that job search requirements raise employment and argued against creating too many exceptions to the rule.
Rachidi said a policy has to be “predictable and consistent” to be effective and that carving too many categories makes a rule “kind of meaningless.”
If approved, states would have a year from the final rule’s effective date to comply, and Labor said it anticipates every state to have to amend its laws and procedures to do it. About 28% of jobless workers nationally collected benefits in 2025, according to the Federal Reserve.
Evermore said she has already started calling state unemployment directors and urging them to take the proposal to their attorneys general. She said she expects the objection to be bipartisan.
The requirement may land unevenly in certain states, she said: “Doing five work searches here in Connecticut, yeah, sure. Doing five work searches in Wyoming, maybe less so.”
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