The EU Signs Off New Benefit Rules for People Who Move: Six Months to Take Unemployment Pay Abroad, and Tighter Terms for Posted Workers

A jobseeker who leaves Portugal to look for work elsewhere in the European Union will be able to take Portuguese unemployment benefit along for six months instead of three, under new EU rules that received their final approval on Monday. The same rules decide which country pays benefits to people who live on one side of a border and work on the other, set tighter conditions for workers posted abroad, and bring long-term care into EU law by name for the first time.

The Council of the European Union, where the member states' governments sit, adopted the regulation on 28 September. It amends the two regulations that coordinate national social security systems across the EU, Regulation 883/2004 and its implementing regulation 987/2009, and closes a file the European Commission opened in December 2016. The European Parliament approved the text on 7 July. This account is taken from the Council's announcement and the final adopted text.

The rules do not harmonise benefits: each country still decides who it insures and what it pays. They decide which country is responsible when a person has lived or worked in more than one, so that nobody loses cover by moving.

When it applies

The regulation takes effect on the first day of the month after it is published in the EU's Official Journal. Some parts apply at once, including most of the changes to the annexes, such as the Portuguese disability benefit mentioned below. Most of the changes people will notice, including the unemployment, posting, long-term care and family benefit rules below, apply only 24 months after that. Until then, the current rules stand.

Unemployment benefit

• Taking benefit abroad. An unemployed person who goes to another EU country to look for work will keep their benefit for six months, as long as that does not run past their total entitlement. The country paying can extend this to the end of the entitlement. The current limit is three months, extendable to six.
• One month of work first. To count insurance periods from other countries towards a claim, you will need to have worked, or been insured, for at least one uninterrupted month in the country you claim in. If you have not, the previous country where you completed at least one month becomes responsible for paying.
• Cross-border workers. People who live in one country and work in another will, in future, draw benefit from the country where they worked, provided they worked there without a break for at least 22 weeks. They can register with the job centre in the country where they live, which reports to the paying country every month. Luxembourg, where frontier workers are an unusually large share of the workforce, keeps the old rules for five years, which it can stretch to seven.
• Working while on benefit. Someone who takes up work in one country while receiving unemployment benefit from another stays under the social security system of the country paying the benefit.

Posted workers

An employer can still send a worker to another EU country for up to 24 months while the worker stays insured at home. The new text adds conditions:

• A person hired in order to be posted must have been insured in the employer's country for at least three months immediately before starting the job. A self-employed person must have worked for at least three months before going abroad under the same rule.
• After 24 months posted to one country, with gaps of no more than two months, the same person cannot be posted there again under these rules until at least two months have passed.
• The authority in the home country must be told in advance, and the certificate that proves where the worker is insured, known as the A1, must be requested. Business trips are exempt, as is any other work lasting no more than three consecutive days in a 30-day period. The three-day exemption does not apply to construction.

Long-term care and family benefits

Long-term care has so far been coordinated as if it were a sickness benefit, which the regulation says has caused legal uncertainty. The new text defines it: help for a person who, because of an impairment, needs considerable assistance from others with essential daily activities for an extended period, including benefits paid to the carer. It stays coordinated like sickness benefits as a general rule, and each country's benefits will be listed in an annex.

Family benefits are split into two kinds: those that replace income a parent loses while raising a child, and all others. The first kind will be paid only to the parent insured in that country, with no right passed on to the other parent. Portugal's entries on that list are the parental allowance from the seventh week after the birth, the extended parental allowance and the adoption allowance.

Other changes that touch Portugal

The basic component and the supplement of Portugal's Prestação Social para a Inclusão (Social Inclusion Benefit, a disability benefit) are added to the annex of special non-contributory benefits. Benefits on that list are paid only to people living in the country that pays them and cannot be taken abroad.

For EU citizens who do not work, the text writes into the regulation that equal treatment must follow the rulings of the EU Court of Justice on access to welfare for inactive citizens. It also asks countries to make sure that such people are not prevented from meeting the requirement to have comprehensive health insurance where they live, allowing them, under national law, to pay a proportionate contribution into a health insurance scheme where they have no other way to qualify.

The regulation also gives national authorities a legal basis to compare their data with other countries' to catch fraud and errors, and sets a procedure for challenging certificates, such as the A1, that another country has issued.

What to do now

Nothing changes yet for anyone claiming today. If you lose your job in Portugal and want to look for work in another EU country, today's limit still applies (three months, which the paying authority can extend to six), and you need the U2 form from the job centre before you leave. Our guide Claiming Unemployment Benefit in Portugal explains the claim and how work in other EU countries counts towards it. For pensions, see How Your Years Working Abroad Count toward a Pension in Portugal.