Cross-state comparison — unemployment insurance benefit appeals

States covered: TX, CA, NY, FL, PA, OH, IL, MI, WA, NJ, NC, VA, MA, AZ, MN, MO, WI, MD, CT, OR, CO, NV, SC, KY, IA, WV, ME, KS, OK, UT, AL, IN, LA, MT, NE, RI, NM, ID, NH, VT, DE (41 of 50). Built: 2026-08-08, wake 6. Updated: 2026-09-11, wake 66 — notes 71 and 76 recounted against forty-one columns. Both carried counts that matched no denominator. Delaware is a sixth state shutting a lay advocate out, by a rule its own statute contradicts (note 71), and note 76 had missed that Connecticut's unit names a precedent provision. Earlier: 2026-09-09, wake 65 — the closing section's counts re-derived against all forty-one columns, clearing a debt outstanding since wake 57. It corrected seven claims. One was not arithmetic: a phrase this page quoted as Massachusetts law ("whichever occurs first") appears in no Massachusetts source, having been lifted at wake 56 from units/MA.md's own section heading. That section lists all seven. Earlier: 2026-09-09, wake 64 — Delaware added, with notes 149–152. Delaware is the second covered state whose first-level deadline is known to have changed after the DOL comparison's most recent edition — Maine was the first (note 90) — and both changes are lengthenings, both enacted in 2023, and both still unreported outside the code (note 149, with an amendment to note 90); the only one whose second-level hearing is required by rule to be in person (note 151); the ninth published with no agency practice source, its cause a rejected request rather than a stated policy (corrected at wake 69 — note 140); and the first whose administrative code reaches only the second level, leaving the hearing most claimants attend with no published procedure at all (note 151). Earlier: 2026-09-06, wake 62 — Vermont added, with notes 141–148 and amendments to notes 35, 45, 57, 98, 132, 137 and 140. Vermont is the third covered state to reach its supreme court with no court below it (falsifying note 132's "second"), the third whose law answers E1 in neither direction (corrected at wake 68 — note 144), the eighth published with no agency practice source (corrected at wake 69 — note 148), and one of seventeen that publish a fee number (corrected at wake 68 — note 146). At that wake the closing section's counts were still the wake-56 derivation against thirty-eight columns, except the trial-court count, which wake 62 corrected in place; the rest were re-derived at wake 65. Earlier: 2026-09-04, wake 60 — New Hampshire added, with notes 136–140 and an amendment to note 132, whose claim that Idaho was the only covered state to reach its supreme court with no court below it New Hampshire falsifies. At that wake the closing section's counts were still the wake-56 derivation against thirty-eight columns, with only the one sentence New Hampshire changes corrected in place. Wake 56 re-derived it against all thirty-eight columns, correcting four counts carried from wake 51. Wake 55 added Idaho, with notes 131–135 and an amendment to note 71, whose count of the covered states that shut a lay advocate out Idaho raises from four to five — by a route none of the other four takes, since Idaho closes the door to the employer's representative and leaves it open to the claimant's. Wake 54 added New Mexico, with notes 126–130 and an amendment to note 55. The closing section's counts were re-derived at wake 56 against all thirty-eight columns, which also corrected four counts carried from wake 51; that section lists them. Rhode Island was added at wake 53 with notes 121–125. Source: distilled entirely from units/TX.md, units/CA.md, units/NY.md, units/FL.md, units/PA.md, units/OH.md, units/IL.md, units/MI.md, units/WA.md, units/NJ.md, units/NC.md, units/VA.md, units/MA.md, units/AZ.md, units/MN.md, units/MO.md, units/WI.md, units/MD.md, units/CT.md, units/OR.md, units/CO.md, units/NV.md, units/SC.md, units/KY.md, units/IA.md, units/WV.md, units/ME.md, units/KS.md, units/OK.md, units/UT.md, units/AL.md, units/IN.md, units/LA.md, units/MT.md, units/NE.md, units/RI.md, units/NM.md, units/ID.md, units/NH.md, units/VT.md, units/DE.md. No new research; every cell traces to a unit, and each unit carries the primary-source quote and citation. Where this table and a unit disagree, the unit wins — the unit has the quoted statutory text, this page has only a summary of it.

This is a reference for orientation, not legal advice, and not a substitute for reading the notice you actually received. Deadlines here are the statutory numbers, and whether one that lands on a weekend or holiday moves at all is now a question with seven different answers. (This sentence said "three" for several wakes after the list below had grown past three; corrected at wake 37, which also added the seventh.) Most covered states extend it by a calendar rule. Maryland's general extension reaches "a Sunday or legal holiday" and not Saturday (note 52). Connecticut gets there by a mechanism that never mentions the calendar: its only extension applies when the last day falls on a day the agency's offices "are not open for business," which reaches Saturdays and holidays because the offices are shut on them, not because of what day it is (note 55). And Oregon appears to have no extension at all — no weekend, holiday or office-closure rule was found for either of its first-level deadlines, and the general computation statute that supplies one in other contexts is confined by its own terms to acts performed in a court (note 57). An earlier version of this paragraph said every covered state but one extends such a deadline; Oregon falsified it. South Carolina supplies a fourth answer, and it is the uncomfortable one: the law is silent the way Oregon's is, but the agency's own appeals page tells claimants "By law" that the deadline moves to the next business day — a rule that appears nowhere in the statute, the appeal regulations, or the state's general rules of construction (note 69). West Virginia supplies a fifth: the extension is real and written down, but it lives in the Board of Review's own rule rather than in the code, and it is phrased as postmark acceptance rather than as a calendar rule — while the code separately carries a broader provision reaching any deadline set by administrative rule, so there are two routes to the answer and the agency's pages cite neither (note 86). Maine supplies a sixth, and it was for six wakes the only one that turned on how the appeal is sent — Nebraska is now the second, by a different mechanism (note 117): its rule extends a deadline past a Saturday, Sunday or holiday for an appeal delivered in hand, and past only a Sunday or a holiday for one put in the mail, so the same Saturday deadline moves or does not move depending on the method (note 91). Kansas supplies a seventh, and it is the one where the answer changes partway up the chain: the extension is written into the appeal statute itself, but its scope sentence names only the appeals to the referee and to the board, so the third deadline in the same section — the 16 days to reach a court — is left to a general computation statute that may or may not reach it. Two of Kansas's three identical deadlines certainly extend past a Saturday; the third is an open question, and it is the last one (note 94). Delaware supplies no eighth answer either, and the cleanest instance of all: 19 Del. C. § 3304 puts the mailbox rule, the Saturday-Sunday-holiday roll-forward and the calendar-days default in one three-sentence section inside the unemployment chapter itself — the whole question answered in one place, and that place nine sections away from any appeal provision, cross-referenced by none of them (note 150). Oklahoma supplies no eighth answer but the cleanest instance of one already on the list: nothing in the unemployment title or the Commission's rules mentions a weekend or a holiday at all, and the extension comes from the general-provisions title, which designates "[e]ach Saturday, Sunday" a holiday and then lets any act due on a holiday "be performed on the next succeeding business day" (25 O.S. § 82.1(A), (C)) — Colorado's shape, but with Saturday and Sunday named in the statute rather than inferred, and with nothing in the unemployment law pointing the reader to it (units/OK.md B2). Alabama combines two of the answers already on this list into one sentence, and then its agency contradicts both. § 1-1-4 names Sunday and a legal holiday, not Saturday — Maryland's shape — and then adds a third branch reaching "a day on which the office in which the act must be done shall close as permitted by any law of this state," which is Connecticut's office-closure mechanism. So whether an ordinary Saturday moves an Alabama deadline turns on whether the appeals office is lawfully shut, and nothing read for units/AL.md establishes that it is. The department's own benefit-rights booklet tells claimants a weekend extends the deadline regardless, which is South Carolina's note-69 problem a second time (note 103). Indiana carries the most complete list in this table, and it is a rule that carries it. Indiana's general rules of construction contain no computation-of-time provision at all — IC 1-1-4-1 and IC 1-1-4-5 were both read for units/IN.md and neither has one — so the only source is 646 IAC 5-10-19(f), an administrative rule, which extends the deadline past a Saturday, a Sunday, a legal holiday, and “a day that the department is closed during regular business hours.” That is the calendar answer and Connecticut's office-closure answer written into one provision with no gap between them. West Virginia's extension also lives in a rule rather than the code; Indiana's goes further and claims the statute's own deadlines for itself, applying by its terms to any period prescribed “by any applicable statute” (note 105). Louisiana supplies an eighth answer, and it is the only one where a rule denies the extension and a statute-code article grants it. § IV-109(C) says legal holidays and days the agency is closed “shall not serve to extend” the appeal periods, and § IV-107's own extension excepts any time “prescribed by statute” — which these fifteen-day periods are. La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 5059(D)(1), amended in 2025, says a legal holiday “shall be excluded” in computing the time to appeal a decision of an executive-branch state agency, and names three departments it does not reach, none of them the labour agency. And because R.S. 1:55 makes Sunday a legal holiday statewide but Saturday one only in named parishes and districts, the Saturday question in Louisiana has a different answer in different parts of the state (note 108). Separately, New York's extension comes from a general statute rather than a UI-specific rule — as does Minnesota's, whose unemployment chapter never cross-references that general rule at all, so units/MN.md B2 records the application as an inference — Michigan's is confirmed only for filings with the hearing system, not for the initial protest to the agency (units/MI.md B2), and New Jersey's appears only on the agency's own web pages — no statute states it and the governing rules could not be read (units/NJ.md B2) — and the event that starts the clock is usually mailing, not receipt, which is the single most common way a real appeal is lost.

The table

Notes the table cannot hold

1. Texas stacks two 14-day clocks. A Commission decision becomes final 14 days after mailing (§ 212.153), and suit must be filed within 14 days after that (§ 212.201(a)) — so the window to sue opens on roughly day 15 and closes on roughly day 28. It is not a single 14-day period from mailing. TWC describes it this way itself.

2. Texas has two different "good cause" questions and only one of them has an answer you want. There is no good cause for filing a late appeal (40 TAC § 815.32(i)(8)), but there is good cause for missing a scheduled hearing after a timely appeal (§ 815.16(5)(B)). Two clocks that read almost identically. See units/TX.md.

3. New York's trigger date has an internal tension. The statute runs the 30 days from mailing (Labor Law § 620(1)(a)); the regulation deems a request timely if postmarked within 30 days of receipt, with receipt presumed within 5 business days of mailing. The statutory number is the safe one to plan around; the regulation is the fallback argument. Flagged as an inference in units/NY.md.

4. Exhaustion. Texas answers it in the text — a motion for rehearing is not required (§ 212.203(b)). California and Florida do not: both units record "NOT FOUND IN PRIMARY SOURCE" for whether a rehearing/reconsideration step is a prerequisite to judicial review. That is a recorded absence after searching, not a "no." Ohio's unit infers no request-for-review requirement from the finality mechanics of § 4141.281(C)(3) — labeled an inference, not a found sentence. Illinois runs the opposite way: units/IL.md infers that a Board of Review appeal is required before judicial review, because 820 ILCS 405/1100 makes only Board decisions reviewable — also an inference from finality mechanics, not a found sentence. Washington answers it in the text like Texas: "The filing of a petition for reconsideration is not a prerequisite for filing a petition for judicial review" (WAC 192-04-190(4), echoing RCW 34.05.470(5)). Minnesota, added later, is the first covered state to answer the question the other way, and it does so structurally rather than by a sentence saying so: § 268.105, subd. 7(a) gives the Court of Appeals a decision "on reconsideration" to review and nothing else, and subd. 2(f) makes that decision the final one "unless judicial review is sought." A party who skips reconsideration has no reviewable decision and no clock to file against. The chapter uses the word "exhaust" once, in a narrower place — a party who failed to participate in the hearing "is considered to have failed to exhaust available administrative remedies" unless they seek reconsideration and show good cause (subd. 1a(b)). Missouri, added a wake later, is the first covered state to answer the question in a plain sentence rather than by structure or inference: "Judicial review of any decision of the commission shall be permitted only after the party claiming to be aggrieved thereby has exhausted the administrative remedies as provided by this law and the rules and regulations of the division" (§ 288.200.2). What must be exhausted is the filing of the application for review, not a successful rehearing — a denial is enough to open the courthouse (note 41). Wisconsin, added a wake after Missouri, is the second state to answer in an express sentence — and the first to answer it differently depending on who is asking: "Any party that is not the department may commence an action for the judicial review of a decision of the commission under this chapter after exhausting the remedies provided under this section," while "the department ... is not required to have been a party to the proceedings before the commission or to have exhausted the remedies provided under this section" (§ 108.09(7)(a)). The same paragraph attaches a consequence the other express-sentence state does not: a plaintiff who fails to name the department or the commission as defendants and serve the commission gets the action dismissed. What must be exhausted is the hearing and the petition for commission review; no rehearing motion is required, and none is provided for a party to file (note 44). Connecticut, added a wake after Maryland, is the third express-sentence state, and it says it in very nearly Missouri's words: "Judicial review of any decision shall be permitted only after a party aggrieved thereby has exhausted his or her remedies before the board, as provided in this chapter" (§ 31-249a(c)). It shares Missouri's shape as well as its phrasing — what must be exhausted is reaching the board, not winning there and not first moving to reopen, because § 31-249b lets a party appeal to the Superior Court "[a]t any time before the board's decision has become final," which is the same clock a reopening motion runs on. The two are alternatives, not steps. Connecticut is also the only covered state to label the distinction in a rule heading: Regs. § 31-237g-34 is titled "Decision of the Referee; final date; motion and appeal distinguished." So of nineteen covered states, two say reconsideration is not required in terms, one says it is by structure (Minnesota, note 38), three say it is in an express sentence (Missouri; Wisconsin, which exempts the agency from its own rule; Connecticut), and the rest either infer an answer or record its absence.

5. Standing to appeal is not uniform. New York conditions further appeal on having appeared at the level below (§§ 621(1), 624) — a party who skips the hearing can lose the right to appeal at all, independent of any deadline.

6. "Recoupment" and "liability" may not be the same thing in Florida. The without-fault waiver in § 443.151(6)(d) bars recoupment from future benefits, while (6)(e) separately authorizes collection by civil action. Whether a without-fault claimant stays exposed to a civil suit is genuinely unresolved in the statutory text. units/FL.md records it as an open question; it is not resolved here.

7. The benefits keep flowing cells rest on very unequal footing. Florida, California, and Ohio say it in statutory text — Ohio the most directly of any state covered (§ 4141.28(I) states both the pay-pending and withhold-pending halves in one sentence). Texas is the general operative-determination rule applied to the employer-appeal case; New York is an inference from the absence of a contrary provision plus an agency practice page; Pennsylvania has no law on the question at all — its governing section was repealed in 1978 and never replaced, so the answer is agency practice standing alone. Same practical answer in all six states, six different levels of evidence. (Washington, added later, rests on yet another footing: a payment-baseline statute — RCW 50.20.170, benefits paid "in accordance with such initial determination" — plus an express no-stay proviso that reaches only the judicial-review stage; the administrative-pendency application is an inference flagged in units/WA.md. And Massachusetts, added later still, is the thinnest footing yet: nothing in c. 151A addresses a pending administrative appeal at all, only a clause repeated at each level that benefits follow whichever decision is currently in force — the chapter's single express pay-pending sentence governs the appeal from the district court, one step past the last administrative stage. units/MA.md E1.)

8. Pennsylvania's reconsideration window is a trap. A party has 15 days to ask the Board to reconsider (34 Pa. Code § 101.111) and 30 days to appeal to Commonwealth Court — and the rule says in terms that requesting reconsideration "will not extend the appeal period." Waiting for a reconsideration ruling can forfeit the court appeal.

9. Pennsylvania's own agency hosts a stale copy of its own statute. Act 30 of 2021 raised the appeal deadline from 15 days to 21. An older compiled edition of the UC Law, still on L&I's domain and not marked superseded, shows 15. units/PA.md records both URLs and which one is current. A citation is only as good as the edition it was read from.

10. Ohio inserts a director step before any hearing. An appeal of the initial determination goes first to the director, who has 21 days to either issue a redetermination (which restarts the same 21-day appeal clock) or transfer the case to a UCRC hearing officer. The first adjudicative hearing is therefore one layer deeper than in the other five states covered at the time, even though the total chain looks similar on paper. Ohio no longer stands alone: Michigan inserts a comparable — and stricter — pre-hearing step (note 14).

11. Ohio's non-receipt escape hatch is unique among the six so far — and it reaches the courthouse. R.C. § 4141.281(D)(9) restarts the appeal clock on proof (which "may consist of testimony from the interested party") that the determination or decision was not actually received in time — and a fourth sentence extends the same relief to the 30-day judicial-review deadline, with the court of common pleas as fact-finder on timeliness. The other covered states key their ordinary claimant deadlines to mailing/sending and offer no receipt-based statutory reset. (Michigan, added later, comes closest without matching it: its good-cause rule lists failure to receive a timely notice as a ground for excusing lateness — an excuse to be argued, not a reset of the clock, and by rule, not statute. R 421.270(1)(e), units/MI.md B4. New Jersey, added later still, does something categorically different: its employer clock affirmatively starts at "confirmed receipt" — an ordinary receipt trigger, not a non-receipt escape hatch — while its claimant clock still runs from mailing. Note 18.)

12. Illinois writes down no late-appeal excuse whatsoever — which is not the same as Texas' "no." Texas' rule says affirmatively that there is no good-cause exception (with seven narrow carve-outs); Illinois' statute and rules are simply silent — a full-text search found no excuse standard at all. What Illinois does provide is procedural: an appeal that looks late is dismissed without a hearing unless the appeal letter itself raises a timeliness dispute, in which case the Referee hears the question of whether the filing was actually timely (56 Ill. Adm. Code 2720.207). The argument available is I was not actually late, never I was late for a good reason. Whether case law adds anything on top was not researched.

13. Illinois puts an enforceable clock on second-level inaction — and Massachusetts, added later, puts a much faster one running the opposite way (note 30). The Board of Review must decide within 120 days (extendable 30 for good cause). After that, a party may demand a "Notice of Right to Sue"; the Board then has 14 days to issue its decision or the Notice, any decision issued after that window "shall be null and void," and the Referee's decision becomes the final administrative decision by operation of law — opening the 35-day judicial-review window (820 ILCS 405/803; 56 Ill. Adm. Code 2720.345(d)). Massachusetts reaches a superficially similar place by the opposite route: its board has 21 days to grant or deny review and silence is a denial, not a forced decision (note 30). Illinois' clock protects the appeal; Massachusetts' clock ends it. In the other eleven covered states, a stalled second-level appeal simply waits.

14. Michigan requires two appeals before anyone hears evidence. A determination cannot be appealed to a judge at all: a protest to the agency must first produce a redetermination (MCL 421.32a), and only the redetermination is appealable to an ALJ — each step on its own 30-day clock running from mailing or personal service. This is Ohio's director-step structure (note 10) in a stricter form: Ohio's director may either redetermine or transfer the appeal straight to a hearing officer, while Michigan's agency issues a redetermination in the ordinary course — direct transfer to an ALJ happens only if the agency chooses it or both parties agree (§ 32a(4)). A Michigan claimant therefore faces two consecutive filing deadlines before reaching a hearing, and missing either one forfeits the chain.

15. Michigan's second-level timeliness rule points two ways at once. The good-cause rule (R 421.270) says on its face that it reaches the § 34 second-level deadline — but the hearing-system rule R 792.11418(3) declares the commission "without jurisdiction to consider the merits of any appeal received after the 30-day appeal period." The recourse the latter rule offers is indirect: ask the ALJ to reopen within 1 year of the decision's mailing, then appeal the reopening ruling. units/MI.md B4 records both texts without resolving the tension; neither rule cites the other.

16. Michigan's freshly amended statute names an abolished tribunal. 2024 PA 238 — effective July 17, 2026, three weeks before this page's last update — still directs second-level appeals to the "Michigan compensation appellate commission," a body abolished by Executive Reorganization Order 2019-3 (compiled at MCL 125.1998), which transferred its functions to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Commission. The rules are staler: the hearing rules (last amended 2015) still say MCAC throughout, and the good-cause rule (last amended 2001) still says "board of review" — two renamings out of date. This is a different failure than Pennsylvania's (note 9): there, the agency hosts a superseded edition of a current statute; here, the current text itself was out of date the day it took effect. Filings go to the UIAC in practice.

17. Washington's appeal chain leaves the agency and comes back. The first-level "appeal tribunal" is an administrative law judge of the Office of Administrative Hearings — an agency RCW 34.12.010 makes "independent of state administrative agencies" — while the second level, the Commissioner's Review Office, sits back inside ESD (WAC 192-04-020 defines both terms in one rule). Michigan is the nearest analog among covered states — its ALJs also sit in an outside hearing system (MOAHR) — but Washington's round trip, out to an independent agency and back into the department for review, is so far its own shape. ESD's rule adopts OAH's model rules of procedure (ch. 10-08 WAC) as gap-filler, so hearing mechanics like the remote-by-default format rule are OAH's, not ESD's.

18. New Jersey splits the first-level deadline by party — different lengths and different trigger events. R.S. 43:21-6(b)(1) (as amended through L.2022, c.120) gives an employer seven calendar days from "a confirmed receipt of notification" while a claimant gets 21 calendar days from mailing (or from electronic delivery the claimant opted into). No other covered state varies the first-level deadline by party, and the employer's seven days is the shortest first-level window anywhere in this table — half of Texas' 14. Two wrinkles recorded in units/NJ.md B1: the Division's own employer-facing page describes the same seven-day clock as running from mailing — a different trigger event than the statute's "confirmed receipt," unresolved there — and the receipt trigger makes the employer window unlike every other ordinary deadline covered (note 11).

19. New Jersey's Board of Review is of right only sometimes — Ohio no longer stands alone. R.S. 43:21-6(e) says the Board "may permit any of the parties... to initiate further appeals before it," and "shall permit" a further appeal only where the tribunal decision "is not unanimous" or "has been overruled or modified" an earlier determination. Outside those two categories the text leaves permission to the Board — structurally like Ohio's discretionary "review level" (note 10's body), though with a difference: Ohio's disallowance is itself a final, court-appealable decision, while New Jersey's statute does not say what a refusal to permit an appeal would be. The Division's public pages describe further appeal to the Board without qualification; whether the Board declines timely appeals in practice was not determined (units/NJ.md F1).

20. New Jersey's courthouse door is entirely practice-sourced. R.S. 43:21-6(h) grants "judicial review" of a Board of Review decision — and then stops. No court is named, no filing deadline, no standard of review; a full-text sweep of the chapter finds "Superior Court" only in tax-collection contexts. The Appellate Division venue and the 45-day window appear only on the Board of Review's own web page (the New Jersey Court Rules that presumably supply them were not read for the unit). Contrast Pennsylvania, where the record-review standard sits in statute (2 Pa.C.S. § 704): two no-trial-court states, one with the door written into law, one with it posted on a web page.

21. New Jersey pays a partially-disqualified claimant during the claimant's own appeal. Where the appealed denial is a time-limited R.S. 43:21-5 disqualification, R.S. 43:21-6(b)(1) withholds benefits "only for the period of disqualification" — the weeks after that period are paid while the appeal is still pending, and if the claimant wins, the withheld weeks are paid retroactively (conditioned on weekly certifications). In every other covered state, a denied claimant is paid nothing until a decision reverses the denial. This is a different object than the pay-pending rules in the table's last row, which concern a claimant who has won below.

22. North Carolina's monetary protest is a separate, shorter clock in front of the main one. The 30-day appeal in the table runs from the Adjudicator's determination on a contested issue. The wage-calculation ("monetary") determination has its own 10-day protest window (G.S. 96-15(b)(1)) — and the same subsection gives the Division a one-year power to reconsider a determination on its own initiative for computation or identity errors, newly available wages, or nondisclosure. A determination is not necessarily settled just because the appeal window closed. units/NC.md B1, B5.

    (Amended when Oregon was added.) North Carolina no longer stands alone. Oregon runs the same two-clock structure and with the same 10 days on the monetary side — ORS 657.266(5) gives ten days to request a hearing on the initial or amended determination fixing the weekly benefit amount, maximum amount and duration, while ORS 657.269(2) gives twenty on a decision allowing or denying the claim. Two differences are worth keeping. North Carolina's shorter clock is a protest preceding the appeal chain; Oregon's is a request for hearing into the same chain, before the same administrative law judge, differing only in length and in which section sets it. And Oregon's two clocks are harder to notice, because both are called a "request for hearing," they sit in adjacent sections, and only the twenty-day one advertises itself — ORS 657.269 is captioned Decision final unless hearing requested, while ORS 657.266 is captioned Initial determination of eligibility and amount of benefits, with its appeal clause in subsection (5). The Department's own appeals page does give both numbers correctly.

23. North Carolina's second level is the tightest squeeze in the table. The window drops from 30 days to 10 as you climb — the sharpest tightening of any covered state (New York goes 30→20, New Jersey 21→20). The cushion is borrowed from general civil procedure: G.S. 96-15(c2) applies Rule 6(e) to add 3 days when notice came by mail — the only covered state whose UI statute reaches into the civil-procedure rules for its mail allowance. units/NC.md F1. (Amended when Minnesota was added.) Minnesota adds days for mailing too — three of them, on the certiorari petition alone (§ 268.105, subd. 7(a)) — but writes the allowance into its own unemployment statute rather than borrowing one, so North Carolina keeps the distinction as stated. Two states, one mechanism, two different sources of authority.

24. Two states name a late-appeal excuse they never define — a fourth answer-shape, and it is not a one-off. Texas says "no" affirmatively; Illinois says nothing at all; Pennsylvania supplies a procedure but no standard, leaving the content to case law. North Carolina's rules use the phrase "good cause for filing a late appeal or protest" (04 NCAC 24A .0106(c)) and define good cause as "a legally sufficient reason" — but the phrase is followed only by postmark machinery for establishing when a document was mailed, and the sole concrete excuse standard anywhere in the rules is the Texas-style misleading-information waiver. Virginia, added a wake later, has the same shape from the other direction: the statute grants the extension ("For good cause shown, the 30-day period may be extended," § 60.2-619 D) and the rules build a procedure on top of it — 16VAC5-80-20 makes "whether the appeal was timely filed or whether there exists good cause for extending the appeal period" the first issue at the hearing — while neither ever says what good cause is. Both states also have a defined good cause sitting nearby for a different question: Virginia's rules define it for postponing a scheduled hearing ("a likelihood of material and substantial harm"), which is Texas' two-clocks trap (note 2) reappearing in a state that does allow late appeals. When this reference covered one such state the shape looked like an oversight; at two, with different statute-versus-rule divisions of labor, it looks like a category. units/NC.md B4, units/VA.md B4. Massachusetts, added a wake later, marks the far end of the same axis: twelve enumerated good-cause examples in 430 CMR 4.14 (note 29). The written answers to this one question now run from an affirmative "no," through silence, through a named but contentless phrase, to an itemised list — and none of it tracks how long the underlying deadline is. Missouri, added a wake later, closes the shape from the same direction North Carolina and Virginia leave open. Its statute grants the extension exactly as Virginia's does — the thirty-day period "may, for good cause, be extended" (§ 288.070.10) — and its rule then does the thing neither North Carolina's nor Virginia's does: it defines the term, and defines it against the statute by name. 8 CSR 10-5.010(2)(C) supplies good cause "[f]or the purposes of sections 288.070.10 and 288.130.5, RSMo" as those circumstances in which "the party acted in good faith and reasonably under all the circumstances." That is a fifth point on this axis and the one that shows the other two are drafting gaps rather than a deliberate style: the same statute-plus-rule division of labor that leaves Virginia's standard empty fills Missouri's (note 40).

25. Virginia's code renamed its own appeal body and only half-finished. Acts 2024, cc. 562, 603 repealed § 60.2-621 outright and rewrote the surrounding sections to route a first-level appeal to "the Commission's Administrative Law Division's Office of First Level Appeals," replacing a named "appeal tribunal." But § 60.2-622 — amended by the same act — still describes the decision under review as one made by an "appeals examiner," and § 60.2-626, untouched since 1986, still empowers "the chairman of an appeal tribunal" to issue subpoenas. Three vintages of institutional name are live in one chapter. Compare Michigan (note 16), where the freshly amended statute names a tribunal that no longer exists: Michigan's problem is a statute out of step with the world, Virginia's is a statute out of step with itself. units/VA.md front matter. Separately, Virginia's electronic-delivery trigger is the third distinct treatment of electronic notice in this table: New Jersey's claimant clock can run from electronic delivery the claimant opted into (note 18), Washington's and North Carolina's "earlier of notification or mailing" lets an electronic notice start the clock by default — and Virginia's opt-in electronic branch is the only one that conditions the trigger on "confirmation of receipt" written into the statute itself.

26. Virginia states two different finality clocks for the same decision and reconciles neither. § 60.2-625(A) gives an aggrieved party 30 days after the Commission's decision is mailed to commence an action in circuit court; § 60.2-622(B)(1) says the decision "shall become final 10 days after the date of notification or mailing." Texas has two clocks too (note 1), but Texas' stack — the decision becomes final on day 14, and suit is filed in the 14 days after that — so the two numbers describe consecutive phases. Virginia's overlap, and nothing read says whether the 10-day finality closes anything, opens the review window, or merely fixes the date from which the 30 days is measured. units/VA.md records it unresolved rather than guessing; anyone relying on the longer number should read both sections.

27. Virginia's overpayment waiver is mandatory and then carves out the case this row is about. § 60.2-633 says the Commission "shall waive" repayment where the overpayment was without fault and repayment would be "contrary to equity and good conscience," and — unusually for this table — defines both halves: without-fault expressly includes administrative error and employer inducement, and equity-and-good-conscience is met if repayment "would deprive the individual of the income required to provide for basic necessities, including shelter, food, medicine, child care, or any other essential living expense." Then the same subsection states that an overpayment is not without fault if it "was the result of (a) a reversal in the appeals process, unless the employer failed to respond timely or adequately" to a request for information. So the ordinary employer-wins-on-appeal overpayment — the exact exposure the last table row measures — falls outside Virginia's mandatory waiver unless the employer's own non-response caused it. A mandatory waiver and a discretionary one are not ranked the way their labels suggest; what each one reaches matters more than how firmly it is worded. (North Carolina's hardship test, note 24's neighbour in the last row, carries the most exact duration thresholds in this table — 180/360 days — but not the only ones. This sentence called it "the only one in this table with duration thresholds" until wake 69; a sweep of E2 in all forty-one units found five more. Louisiana asks whether recovery would leave the claimant "unable to cover ordinary living expenses for six months"; Montana's hardship arithmetic runs "within 12 months of the date of the claimant's request for waiver"; Utah grants the waiver only where circumstances are "not expected to change within the next 90 days," and Washington's presumption sets the same ninety-day condition; Indiana measures household income "for the first two (2) of the last three (3) completed calendar quarters." Virginia matches North Carolina for definitional concreteness on the equity phrase itself.) Also recorded in units/VA.md: the "(Effective July 1, 2028)" version of § 60.2-633 in the current compilation drops the waiver language, which a later wake should re-read against the live code rather than trust from here.

28. Massachusetts has no name for the body that hears the appeal, and for a long time had the shortest claimant deadline in the table. Ten days from delivery in hand or mailing (M.G.L. c. 151A § 39(b)) undercuts Texas' 14; only New Jersey's employer window (7 days, note 18) is shorter, and that one does not touch claimants. Amended when Arizona was added: an Arizona claimant whose determination is handed over in person gets 7 calendar days (note 32) — shorter than Massachusetts' 10. Massachusetts remains the shortest unconditional claimant deadline, since Arizona's 7 days applies only on personal delivery and its ordinary mailed case runs 15. Amended again when South Carolina was added: South Carolina's first-level window is also 10 days from mailing (§ 41-35-660), so the shortest unconditional deadline is now a tie, not a Massachusetts distinction (note 66) — and Iowa's is 10 as well, making it a three-way tie. Amended a third time when West Virginia was added, and this time the claim is gone rather than shared: West Virginia gives eight calendar days (W. Va. Code § 21A-7-8), which undercuts all three, and like Massachusetts it binds claimant and employer alike. The 10-day tie is now second place (note 86). The same 10 days binds every "interested party," so unlike New Jersey the two sides share a clock. What Massachusetts does not supply is an appellate body: the statute promises "a fair hearing before an impartial hearing officer designated by the commissioner" and stops, and no section of c. 151A or 430 CMR read for units/MA.md names an office, division, or tribunal — the regulations call the presiding official a "review examiner," a term the statute never uses. Every other covered state names its first-level body in law. (An agency-practice name may exist; the Department's own pages returned HTTP 403 to every request and were not read, so units/MA.md records this as an absence in the primary sources, not as proof no name exists.)

29. Massachusetts writes the most concrete late-appeal standard in the table, an absolute bar on it, and then a regulation that suspends the bar. 430 CMR 4.14 enumerates twelve good-cause examples — postal delay, death or serious illness in the family, inability to find a translator, non-receipt followed by prompt filing, absence from the Commonwealth while job-hunting, employer intimidation, a Division employee's discouragement, illiteracy or psychological disability, domestic violence — expressly "not limited to" the list. That is the opposite pole from note 24's named-but-undefined category (North Carolina, Virginia) and from Illinois' silence. But § 39(b) then says "In no event shall good cause be considered" after 30 days, 430 CMR 4.13(2) restates it, and 430 CMR 4.15 — captioned "Late Appeals Filed Beyond 30 Days" — provides that the 30-day limitation "shall not apply" in four circumstances. Florida also has an absolute outer bar (five years, table row 2), but nothing in Florida's rules contradicts it. This is a fourth distinct failure of written law in this table: not a stale edition (note 9), not a statute out of step with the world (note 16), not a statute out of step with itself (note 25), but a regulation squarely at odds with the statute it implements.

    (Amended when Connecticut was added.) Massachusetts keeps the label, but only just, and for a reason worth naming. Connecticut's rule enumerates eleven items to Massachusetts' twelve — but they are not the same kind of item. Massachusetts lists examples of what qualifies (postal delay, death in the family, employer intimidation); Connecticut lists factors to weigh (whether the party was represented, the party's familiarity with Appeals Division procedure, prejudice to an adverse party), under a threshold standard supplied first: good cause exists "if a reasonably prudent individual under the same or similar circumstances would have been prevented from filing a timely appeal" (Regs. § 31-237g-15(b)). An example list tells a claimant whether their reason counts; a factor list tells the adjudicator what to think about. So Connecticut is a sixth shape on note 24's axis rather than a second Massachusetts — a standard plus an open factor list, where Missouri supplies a bare standard and no factors, and Massachusetts supplies examples and no standard. Connecticut also has one thing no other covered state has: the definition exists because the legislature ordered it into being by a date certain. Section 31-249h told the Board to adopt a good-cause definition "[o]n or before January 1, 1988" for three named sections. Everywhere else in this table a defined standard is something the agency happened to write or happened not to; in Connecticut it was a statutory deadline the agency had to meet. And Connecticut sets no outer bar of any kind, so it does not reproduce Massachusetts' contradiction — there is no absolute limit for a regulation to suspend.

    (Amended again when Oregon was added.) Massachusetts keeps the label for enumeration — it still lists the most qualifying circumstances by name. But Oregon is more concrete on a question the other two never reach, and it is the practical one. Massachusetts and Connecticut both tell a late appellant what might excuse the delay; neither tells them how long they have once the excuse expires. OAR 471-040-0010(3) does: "'A reasonable time,' is seven days after the circumstances that prevented a timely filing ceased to exist." A full-text search of every unit finds that sentence's shape nowhere else — Oregon is the only covered state that converts an open-ended statutory "reasonable time" into a number. Oregon also does two things neither of the others does. It writes an express exclusion list, foreclosing two arguments by name — failing to update an address while claiming or while knowing of a pending appeal, and "[n]ot understanding the implications of a decision or notice when it is received" — where Massachusetts' and Connecticut's lists run only in the qualifying direction. And it makes one circumstance dispositive rather than weighable: "[n]otwithstanding" the general standard, good cause shall exist where the Department failed to follow its own policies on serving a limited English proficient person. That is the only per-se good-cause rule in this table keyed to the agency's own conduct, and Massachusetts' nearest equivalent — inability to communicate in English without a translator — is a listed example weighed like any other, placing the burden on the claimant rather than on the Department's compliance with its own policy.

30. Massachusetts' second level can end without anyone deciding anything. Under § 41(a) the board of review grants or denies review "in its discretion," must do so "no later than twenty-one days after an appeal is filed," and if it does not, the application "shall be deemed to be denied upon the twenty-first day." Ohio's commission may disallow a request and New Jersey's board "may permit" further appeal (notes 10, 19) — but both act; Massachusetts converts inaction itself into a disposition. The design is not a trap: § 41(c) makes the denial (actual or deemed) turn the first-level decision into the board's own decision for judicial-review purposes, and § 42 supplies a separate start date for the 30-day court clock when the denial was silence rather than a mailed order — which is also the one gap in the mechanism, since § 41(c) measures that clock from "the date of mailing of the notice of the order of the board denying the application" and a deemed denial produces no order to mail. Washington has a 20-day deemed denial too, but only for a reconsideration petition after the second level, not for the appeal itself (units/WA.md F2). Missouri, added a wake later, runs the same conversion mechanism and closes the gap Massachusetts leaves. Its commission also "may allow or deny an application for review," and a denial likewise makes the tribunal's decision "the decision of the commission for the purpose of judicial review" — but Missouri's denial is an actual order, and the statute dates the court clock from "the date of notice of the order of the commission denying the application for review" (§ 288.200.1). Massachusetts' deemed denial produces no order to mail and therefore no date; Missouri's produces both. Same design, one with the last step written in (note 41).

31. Four covered states charge the claimant interest on an overpayment, and they price four different things. (Written when Massachusetts was the only one; amended when Arizona was added, again for Minnesota, and again at wake 37 for Kansas — whose rate is the highest of the four and, unlike Massachusetts' and Minnesota's, is not confined to a conduct finding: K.S.A. 44-719(d)(2) provides that "[a]ny benefit erroneously paid which is not repaid shall bear interest at the rate of 1.5% per month or fraction of a month," an annual 18%. Where there was fraud, misrepresentation or willful nondisclosure it runs from the final determination of overpayment; where there was not, it runs only on a balance still unpaid two years after that determination. So the no-fault claimant gets a two-year grace period and then the same 18%. units/KS.md E2.) (Minnesota — whose interest, like Massachusetts', attaches only to a conduct finding: § 268.18, subd. 2b assesses one percent per month on benefits obtained by misrepresentation and on the 40% penalty that accompanies them, starting 30 days after the penalty determination, and nothing at all on an ordinary reversal-driven overpayment. Minnesota is nonetheless among the harshest on the misrepresentation track — only Kansas's 18% is a higher rate — and the mildest of the four on the ordinary one: the 40% penalty is the largest in this table, while the ordinary overpayment carries no interest, caps any offset at 50% of a payment, and is cancelled by operation of law after six years — the only automatic extinguishment of an overpayment debt in this table. What Minnesota does not have at any point is a waiver: § 268.18, subd. 6(a) says the commissioner "may not compromise the amount of any overpaid unemployment benefits.") A.R.S. § 23-787(G) says interest "on all benefit overpayment debts, including those reduced to judgment, shall accrue at ten percent a year" — every overpayment, fault or not, including the ordinary employer-wins-on-appeal reversal. A.A.C. R6-3-1812(A) softens the timing rather than the scope: a no-fault overpayment accrues nothing until the sixth calendar month after it is established, and accrual stays postponed while the claimant honors a repayment agreement; waived amounts carry no further interest (§ 23-787(H)). The waiver side is asymmetric in the direction you would not guess — interest on a fraud debt may be waived only up to 25%, while § 23-787(G) states no ceiling at all on waiving a non-fraud debt's interest. Massachusetts reaches much less far: M.G.L. c. 151A § 69(a) attaches interest to the knowing-nondisclosure subset of overpayments at the § 15(a) rate — 12% per annum or the c. 62C § 32 rate for the year, whichever is greater — capped at 50% of the amount owed, accruing from the day after the overpayment becomes final and not stayed by a pending waiver request (430 CMR 4.24). Illinois is the only other covered state whose units mention interest at all, and there it runs the other way: against a representative who overcharged (units/IL.md D2). So the two interest states are not variations on one design: Massachusetts prices a finding about the claimant's conduct, Arizona prices the debt. Separately, the ordinary appeal-reversal overpayment — no fault finding — appears to carry no interest at all on this text, since both § 69(a) and 430 CMR 4.22 are worded around "failure knowingly to furnish accurate information"; units/MA.md records that as an inference from scope language, not a found sentence.

32. Arizona splits its first-level deadline by how the notice was served — a third way to write one deadline as two numbers. A.R.S. § 23-773(B) gives "seven calendar days after the delivery of notification, or... fifteen calendar days after notification was mailed." New Jersey splits by party (7 days for the employer, 21 for the claimant, note 18); Washington, North Carolina, and New Jersey's claimant branch stack two possible trigger events and take the earlier or the elected one (note 25's closing paragraph). Arizona does something different again: one party, one event type, but the length of the window depends on the delivery method the agency chose. units/AZ.md reads the pairing against A.A.C. R6-3-1404(C) — which says a document is served on the mailing date "if not served in person" — to conclude that 7 days goes with personal delivery and 15 with mailing, and marks that as an inference, since § 23-773(B) never cross-references the rule. Two consequences worth stating: a personally-served Arizona claimant faces the shortest window in this table (note 28), and the state has no answer written down for a determination served electronically under § 23-682 — neither the statute nor the rule says which of the two clocks such a notice starts, even though R6-3-1503(A) now lets the appeal itself be filed by fax or Internet.

33. Arizona states its second-level deadline twice, at 30 days and at 15 — and the shorter number is the one that appears twice. § 23-671(D) gives thirty days to petition the appeals board; A.A.C. R6-3-1503(C) and R6-3-1504(A)(2) each say fifteen calendar days. This is note 29's failure mode — a regulation squarely at odds with the statute it implements — with the roles of the two texts reversed: in Massachusetts the regulation was the generous one (430 CMR 4.15 suspending the statute's absolute 30-day bar), while in Arizona the regulation is the stricter one, so a party who trusts the rule files early and a party who trusts the statute may file too late. The editions are recorded in units/AZ.md F1 rather than used to pick a winner: the statutory text came from the Legislative Council compilation dated 2025-09-20, R6-3-1504 was last amended effective December 20, 1995, and R6-3-1503 carries a 2013 rulemaking whose affected subsections the history note does not identify. Age is evidence, not an answer.

34. Arizona is the only covered state where the first court can decline to hear the appeal at all. (This note said "the only covered state where a court can decline" until wake 67. New Mexico, added at wake 58, falsifies the broader form: certiorari to the district court "shall be granted as a matter of right to the party applying therefor" (§ 51-1-8(N)), but above it "[a] party does not have an appeal as of right from the decision of the district court on review of administrative decisions involving unemployment compensation benefits" — Rule 12-505 NMRA makes the court of appeals' review discretionary. units/NM.md F3 puts it plainly: "So certiorari is granted as of right at the district court and only on discretion above it." Arizona's discretion sits at the door of the courthouse; New Mexico's sits one floor up. All 41 units were swept for this at wake 67 and those two are the whole list — the several boards of review that may refuse a second-level appeal are administrative bodies, not courts, and were not counted.) Everywhere else in this table, judicial review is a filing: meet the deadline and the court takes the case, however narrow the standard. A.R.S. § 41-1993(B) makes it an application for appeal — filed with the clerk of the appeals board, not the court — and "[t]he court of appeals shall thereafter grant or deny the application for appeal. If the application is denied, the decision of the appeals board shall be deemed final, and further appeal may not be taken." Discretionary review at the second administrative level already exists in this table (Ohio, New Jersey, Massachusetts — notes 10, 19, 30); Arizona extends the same structure one level higher, to the courthouse. Two related features of the same subsection: the appeal is confined to the record, and "[a]n issue may not be raised on appeal that has not been raised in the petition for review before the appeals board" — an issue-preservation rule that does the work an exhaustion requirement would do, in a chapter that never states one (note 4). New York's appearance requirement (note 5) is the nearest thing in this table, and it conditions the administrative appeal, not the judicial one. Arizona also asks for no bond and no docket fee, and states no standard of review anywhere.

35. Arizona is the first covered state to put a flat dollar cap on a representative's fee in the statute itself — and Minnesota, added a wake later, shows the opposite mechanism. (Amended when Minnesota was added.) Minnesota does not cap a non-attorney's fee; it forbids it. "Except for services provided by an attorney-at-law, no person may charge an applicant a fee of any kind for advising, assisting, or representing an applicant" at the hearing, on reconsideration, or in court (§ 268.105, subd. 6(a), echoed in Minn. R. 3310.2916) — while attaching no figure, no percentage, and no approval step to what an attorney may charge. So the written answers now run: a flat statutory dollar cap (Arizona), a percentage-or-hourly cap by rule (Illinois), a percentage cap by rule with a separate interim sub-cap (Virginia), the same percentage cap written into the statute and the rule (Wisconsin), approval without a published figure (California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan and others), and a categorical bar on the unregulated class with the regulated class left unpriced (Minnesota). Maryland, added a wake later, is the first covered state to run both mechanisms at once: a non-lawyer agent "may not charge or accept compensation for representing a claimant" at either level (§§ 8-507(c), 8-5A-08(b)) — Minnesota's categorical bar — while a lawyer is capped by rule at "200 percent of the claimant's weekly benefit amount per case," with more available on an itemized request judged for "the complexity of the case and the reasonableness of the fee" (COMAR 09.32.11.02H). That cap is also the first in this table measured against the weekly benefit amount rather than the maximum benefit amount or the benefits recovered, and it renews: it "may be awarded for each level of appeal," with the Board-level fee awardable "in addition to" the one the Chief Hearing Examiner allowed. So the same nominal 200 percent can be earned twice on one case. Minnesota pairs its bar with a second, different protection stated as broadly as anywhere in this table except Maryland: an applicant "may not be charged fees, costs, or disbursements of any kind" before the judge, the Court of Appeals, or the Supreme Court (subd. 6(b)), needs no filing fee or cost bond for certiorari, and receives the hearing transcript free — while an employer pays the court's filing fee and the department's cost of preparing any transcript it asks for (subd. 7(b)–(c)). (This comparison was narrowed when Maryland was added: it previously said no other covered state stated the protection so broadly.) Maryland states it in four provisions rather than two — the Board and its representatives "may not charge a claimant a fee in any proceeding" (§ 8-5A-07(f)); "[a] court or an officer of a court may not charge an individual who claims benefits a fee in any proceeding under this title" (§ 8-5A-12(a)(4)); no bond may be required and no exception need be entered (§ 8-5A-12(f)); and the transcript an appeal requires is free to the claimant while the appealing party otherwise pays for it in advance (COMAR 09.32.06.09D–E). Same division of labour, reached the long way round. A.R.S. § 23-674(B)(3): an attorney or agent before the appeal tribunal or appeals board "may charge a fee not in excess of seven hundred fifty dollars," with more available only on approval, and A.A.C. R6-3-1502(J) supplies seven reasonableness factors for an above-cap request. Four other covered states publish a number, and each publishes a different kind of number in a different kind of instrument. (This sentence said "three" until wake 62; Vermont is the fifth published figure overall and is set out at note 146 — 10 percent of the maximum benefits at issue, aggregated across representatives, and the only one of the five that reaches a fee charged for a court appearance.) Illinois: 15% of benefits recovered, or $150/hour, whichever is greater, by rule (units/IL.md D2). Virginia: "no fee shall be approved that exceeds 25% of the claimant's maximum benefit amount," by rule, expressly applied to nonlawyer representatives too, plus a separate interim award for multi-stage representation capped at "the lesser of $400 or 10% of the claimant's maximum benefit amount" (16VAC5-80-40 E.3–E.4, units/VA.md D2). Wisconsin, added later, is the first covered state to put the same figure in both instruments at once: Wis. Stat. § 108.09(8)(b) caps what "counsel or another agent" may "together charge or receive from an employee ... in the aggregate" at "10 percent of the maximum benefits at issue unless the department has first approved a specified higher fee," and Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.18 states the same 10%, the same "in the aggregate," the same base, and the same prior-approval escape (note 45). (This note previously said Illinois was the only other state with a published number. That was wrong — Virginia's 25% cap was already in units/VA.md five wakes earlier. Corrected when Wisconsin was added.) California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan and the rest require approval without publishing any figure. Note also what the percentage is taken of: Illinois measures against benefits actually recovered, while Virginia and Wisconsin measure against a maximum — a ceiling that can exceed what the claimant ends up with. A flat cap and a percentage cap fail differently — Arizona's binds hardest on the longest cases, Illinois' on the largest awards. Two Arizona wrinkles recorded in units/AZ.md D2: the statute names "the department" as the approver of an above-cap fee while the rule names "the Appeal Tribunal or Board," and a fee-charging non-attorney must be an agent the party had already retained for some other purpose — the statute does not open paid representation to anyone.

    (Amended when Missouri was added.) Minnesota's mechanism is no longer a one-off. Missouri does the same thing in a rule rather than a statute: a claimant "may represent him/herself or be represented by a duly authorized agent, who may not charge a fee for the representation" (8 CSR 10-5.015(9)(A)), while the neighbouring subsection permits representation by "a licensed Missouri attorney, a nonresident attorney appearing in compliance with Supreme Court Rule 9, or an eligible law student" with no fee language attached to it at all (9)(D). A categorical bar on the unregulated class, the regulated class left unpriced — two covered states, two instruments, one shape. What Missouri does not copy is Minnesota's second protection: no provision was found stating whether a Missouri claimant bears filing or proceeding costs at any stage, where Minnesota answers that across every forum in the chain (note 39).

    (Amended when Connecticut was added.) Connecticut runs a mechanism this catalogue did not contain: it licenses the class the other states either cap or ban. Minnesota, Missouri and Maryland forbid a non-lawyer to charge at all; Arizona, Illinois, Virginia and Wisconsin price what a representative may charge. Connecticut does neither to the paid non-attorney — it registers them. Section 31-272(b)(3) provides that "[n]o authorized agent may represent any party before a referee or the board for a fee unless the agent is registered with the board," and directs the Board to write rules of conduct with "a fine not to exceed one thousand dollars per violation and revocation of registration." Regulations §§ 31-272-1 to -18 build it out: registration numbers to be used at every appearance, a conduct code, a complaint and probable-cause process, and a sanctions ladder running from a letter of reprimand through suspension and revocation to civil fines at the statutory ceiling — adjudicated by the same Board that decides the appeals, sitting in a separate disciplinary capacity. Two lines are drawn precisely: attorneys are expressly excluded from the definition of "authorized agent" for these rules (Regs. § 31-272-1), and the duty attaches to being paid, so an unpaid non-attorney — a relative, a friend, an unpaid union representative — registers nothing. This is a fourth answer to the question the other three mechanisms answer: not how much, not never, but only if we can discipline you.

    Layered under it, Connecticut also publishes a number, which puts it with Illinois, Virginia and Wisconsin rather than with the approval-without-a-figure group. The statute sets an approval requirement and names no figure at all (§ 31-272(b)(2)); the rule supplies one: "Except in extraordinary cases, an approvable fee may not exceed twenty percent of the benefits potentially payable to the claimant as a result of the claim under adjudication plus reasonable and necessary costs" (Regs. § 31-237g-11(d)). Note what that percentage is taken of — a fifth base in this table. Illinois measures against benefits actually recovered, Virginia and Wisconsin against a maximum benefit amount, Maryland against the weekly benefit amount, and Connecticut against benefits potentially payable on the claim being adjudicated: a forward-looking projection made before the case is decided. And it is the only one of the five with an open-ended escape written into the cap itself — "except in extraordinary cases" — rather than an approval route for exceeding it.

    Connecticut's fee-shield is also the broadest in this table in one specific respect, and narrower in another. Section 31-272(b)(1) bars the administrator, the board, its referees "nor any court or officer thereof" from charging or taxing "any fees or costs against any employee or employer" in a benefit-claim proceeding — one sentence covering the whole chain including the courts, and the only shield in this table that protects the employer as well as the claimant, where Minnesota's protects an "applicant" and Maryland's "an individual who claims benefits" (note 39). It is narrower in carrying two express exceptions inside the same sentence: "the record fee on appeal to the Appellate Court," and costs a Superior Court may tax in its discretion against an appellant whose appeal it finds frivolous. Neither Minnesota nor Maryland states an exception of either kind.

    (Amended when Oregon was added.) Oregon shows that approval without a published figure was never a single category — it was a category defined by where the reader stopped looking. ORS 657.295(2) belongs to it exactly: a representative may not "charge or receive for the services more than an amount approved by the director," with no number in the statute. The number exists. OAR 471-040-0020(8) sets what the Director has approved in advance, and does it as two ceilings against two different bases at once — "no more than 25% of an individual's benefits affected by the administrative decision on a disputed claim and no more than 25% of the maximum benefit amount payable as defined under 657.150(5)." The bases are unequal in size: the first counts only what the appealed decision put in issue, while § 657.150(5) caps the entire benefit year at 26 times the weekly benefit amount or a third of base-year wages, whichever is less. So the second ceiling binds only where one decision reaches most of the benefit year, and 25% of the benefits at stake is the operative figure in an ordinary appeal. Two consequences for this table. First, the mechanism list gains an entry: a statutory approval requirement whose figure is pre-approved wholesale by rule rather than set case by case — which is why California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Michigan should be treated as unverified on this point rather than as confirmed instances of unpriced approval; each would need the same look at its rules that Oregon got. Second, and more usefully, where the figure lives is not predictable from the caption: Oregon's sits in subsection (8) of a rule titled "Subpoenas," whose other seven subsections concern issuing subpoenas, serving them, and paying witness mileage (note 56).

    (Amended when Colorado was added.) Colorado occupies a slot this catalogue did not have: no fee provision of any kind. Representation itself is provided for twice — the statute gives every party "the right to be present or to be represented by an attorney or other representative at the hearing" (§ 8-74-106(1)(e)), and rules 11.2.20 and 11.2.21 let an individual appear personally, a partnership or corporation appear through a partner, officer or "duly authorized representative," and any party "designate another person as an authorized representative," with no professional qualification attached. But nothing caps what a representative may charge, nothing requires anyone to approve it, and nothing forbids it. Articles 70 to 82 of title 8 contain no attorney-fee provision at all, and the rules use the word "fee" exactly twice, both times for the cost of copies: a party may obtain records "upon the payment of a reasonable fee to the division" (§ 8-72-107(1)), and copies of decisions on "the payment of a reasonable fee therefor" (rule 11.2.22). Given Oregon's lesson immediately above, that is a searched-and-not-found rather than a proof of absence — but the search here was the whole Act and the whole of parts I, XI, XII and XV of the regulations, and the Oregon trap was a figure hidden inside an approval requirement Colorado does not have to begin with.

    (Amended when Oklahoma was added.) Oklahoma is the second state to be moved out of the approval-without-a-figure group by going and looking, and it took one rule to do it. 40 O.S. § 2-302(A) reads exactly like the group's other members — counsel may not "charge or receive for such services more than an amount approved by the Board of Review," and the statute stops there. OAC 240:15-1-8 supplies the rest: the Board "must approve the fee," the attorney moves for approval "[u]pon final disposition of the claim" and must do so "within one (1) year," approval is "on a quantum meruit basis, provided that the maximum amount of the fee shall not exceed 20% of the claimant's maximum benefit amount," and "[i]t shall be the responsibility of the claimant to pay all attorney fees approved by the Board of Review." That is Oregon's shape — statute delegates, rule publishes — with three differences worth recording. The figure is not pre-approved wholesale as Oregon's is: 20% is a ceiling on a case-by-case quantum meruit award, so the Board still prices every fee and the number only bounds it. The motion carries a deadline running against the attorney rather than the claimant, which puts it with Florida's 15 days and Maryland's 30 rather than with the states that set no clock at all. And the base is the maximum benefit amount, which puts it with Virginia and Wisconsin rather than with Illinois' benefits-recovered or Connecticut's benefits-potentially-payable.

    The sharpest thing about Oklahoma's version is not in Oklahoma. 40 O.S. § 2-302(A) and K.S.A. 44-718(b) are the same provision. Both bar charging a claimant "fees or costs of any kind in any proceeding"; both let counsel be retained but forbid charging "more than an amount approved by" the named authority; both close with the identical penalty — "for each such offense, be fined not less than $50 nor more than $500, or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both." Two states, one drafting ancestor, and opposite outcomes for a reader: the Oklahoma Board of Review's figure is published at OAC 240:15-1-8, and the Kansas secretary of labor's is nowhere in the statutes or the regulations (note 93). The words in the statute do not predict whether the number exists in print — which is the whole of what this note has been learning since Oregon, now with a controlled experiment attached. Two states have been checked out of the unpriced group and both had a published figure waiting; Kansas was checked and did not. California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Michigan remain unverified for the same reason as before — nobody has looked at their rules.

    So the mechanism list now runs: a flat statutory dollar cap (Arizona), a percentage-or-hourly cap by rule (Illinois), a percentage cap by rule with a separate interim sub-cap (Virginia), the same percentage in statute and rule (Wisconsin), a percentage against a fifth base with an extraordinary-cases escape plus mandatory registration and a disciplinary code (Connecticut), a statutory approval requirement whose figure is pre-approved wholesale by rule (Oregon), a statutory approval requirement whose rule sets a ceiling on a case-by-case quantum meruit award, backed by a criminal penalty (Oklahoma), a categorical bar on the unregulated class (Minnesota, Missouri), both mechanisms at once (Maryland), approval without a published figure — unverified — (California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan), and silence (Colorado).

36. Minnesota has the longest first-level deadline in this table and the hardest edge on it. Forty-five calendar days from sending (§ 268.101, subd. 2(f)) is half again the 30 days that was the previous maximum and more than six times New Jersey's employer window. The same number governs all three of its stages — 45 days to appeal a determination, 45 to request reconsideration, 45 to petition for certiorari — so the clock neither tightens as you climb (New York, New Jersey, North Carolina) nor relaxes (Massachusetts). (This note claimed until wake 67 that Minnesota was the only covered state with one number at all three stages, and note 94 repeated it. Both were wrong when written. Counting the table's own first-level, second-level and judicial-review cells, eight covered states run a single number the whole way: Texas 14, Michigan 30, Washington 30, Virginia 30, Louisiana 15, Nevada 11, Kansas 16, Minnesota 45 — and four of the seven others were already published when this note was written at wake 19. Note 62 had even said in terms that Nevada "runs its whole chain on one number." Delaware is the near miss: 15 and 15, then a stacked 15-plus-10 to court. What is actually distinctive about Minnesota is the size of the number, not its repetition.) And the length buys no latitude: a filing on day 46 must be dismissed (note 37). This is the clearest case yet for the proposition the first bullet below has been making since Texas and Illinois — that deadline length and deadline mercy are unrelated variables.

37. Minnesota writes its refusal to excuse a late appeal as an instruction to the judge. Texas' rule says there is no good-cause exception; Illinois' law simply never mentions one; North Carolina and Virginia name a standard they never define. Minnesota does a fifth thing: § 268.105, subd. 1a(c) tells the judge what to do — "must issue a decision dismissing the appeal as untimely" — and the only discretion granted is whether to decide the timeliness question summarily or take evidence on it. That is Illinois' procedural posture (note 12) stated as a command rather than an absence. What makes it sharper is the neighbouring text: "good cause" appears twice in the same section and is defined both times, as "a reason that would have prevented a reasonable person acting with due diligence" from participating in the hearing, or from submitting evidence at it. Minnesota therefore knows how to write a good-cause standard, uses one twice for missing a hearing, and supplies none for missing the deadline — Texas' two-clocks trap (note 2) in its most explicit form yet.

38. Minnesota's appeal chain has one adjudicator in it. Every other covered state puts a second body above the first-level decision-maker — a board, a commission, a tribunal, a reviewing office. Minnesota has none. A single unemployment law judge, who must be a department employee licensed to practice law in the state, holds the evidentiary hearing; the request for reconsideration that occupies the second-level slot is decided by that same judge, and reassignment happens only if the judge has left the department, is on extended or indefinite leave, or was removed from the case (§ 268.105, subd. 2(e)). Two consequences the table cannot hold. First, the step is mandatory in a way almost no other covered state's second level is (note 4): the Court of Appeals reviews "the decision on reconsideration," so skipping it leaves nothing reviewable. (Amended wake 65: "no other covered state" was true when this note was written and is not now. New Hampshire's request to the commissioner to reopen is also unskippable — the appellate board's rule takes appeals from the commissioner's decision on such a request — and it is the harsher of the two, because Minnesota's mandatory step is available as of right while New Hampshire's lies in the commissioner's discretion on three named grounds, RSA 282-A:60.) Second, the reconsideration is confined to the record the same judge made — new evidence may be considered only to decide whether to order an additional hearing, and only on a defined good-cause showing. Massachusetts also lacks a named first-level body (note 28), but that is a gap in the drafting; Minnesota's single-adjudicator chain is deliberate and fully described.

39. Minnesota makes the claimant's side of the whole chain free, in writing. An applicant "may not be charged fees, costs, or disbursements of any kind" before the unemployment law judge, the Court of Appeals, or the Supreme Court (§ 268.105, subd. 6(b)); no non-attorney may charge an applicant a fee at all (subd. 6(a)); no filing fee or cost bond is required to petition for certiorari, and the department must furnish the hearing transcript and exhibits at no cost (subd. 7(c)). The mirror provisions put those same costs on the employer: filing fee per the appellate rules, and the department's cost of preparing any transcript it requests (subd. 7(b)). Arizona also asks no bond or docket fee of a court petitioner (note 34), but as a feature of one filing; Minnesota states it as a rule about the applicant across every forum in the chain, and pairs it with a bar on assessing fees against the department in the other direction (subd. 6(c)).

40. Missouri is the first covered state whose late-appeal good cause is both granted and defined. The statute extends the thirty days "for good cause" (§ 288.070.10) and the rule says what that means — "circumstances in which the party acted in good faith and reasonably under all the circumstances" (8 CSR 10-5.010(2)(C)) — cross-referenced to the statute by section number, so there is no question which standard governs which deadline. Set against the rest of this column the written answers now run: an affirmative "no" (Texas), silence (Illinois), a command to dismiss (Minnesota, note 37), a procedure without a standard (Pennsylvania), a name without content (North Carolina, Virginia, note 24), a closed list of three (Arizona), twelve open-ended examples contradicted by an absolute bar (Massachusetts, note 29), a general standard defined once and applied by cross-reference (Missouri), and — with Wisconsin, added a wake later — a phrase stated identically in statute and rule and defined in neither: an appeal is excused only if it was late "for a reason beyond the appellant's control" (§ 108.09(4)(c); Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.04). That is a different failure from North Carolina's and Virginia's name-without-content (note 24), where one instrument names a standard the other never picks up; here both instruments name the same standard and agree on it, and neither says what it means (note 44). Missouri's is also among the most permissive as written — good faith plus reasonableness, with no outer limit found, where California requires "mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect." And the length of the underlying deadline still predicts nothing: Missouri's 30 days is Illinois' 30 days, and Illinois writes down no excuse at all.

41. Missouri's second level is discretionary, and it is the first covered state where that discretion is fully wired to the courthouse. Four covered states already let the second body decline: Ohio's commission may disallow a request, New Jersey's board "may permit" further appeal, Massachusetts' board grants or denies in its discretion, and Arizona's board sits under a court that may itself refuse the case (notes 10, 19, 30, 34). Missouri's commission "may allow or deny an application for review" like the others — but the same subsection then finishes the mechanism: on denial the tribunal's decision "shall be deemed to be the decision of the commission for the purpose of judicial review," and the judicial-review clock runs "from the date of notice of the order of the commission denying the application for review" (§ 288.200.1). Massachusetts reaches the first half of that and stalls on the second, because a denial by silence produces no order and no mailing date (note 30). New Jersey's statute never says what a refusal to permit an appeal even is (note 19). Missouri is the case where discretionary review, the conversion of the decision below, and the restarted clock are all three written down.

42. Missouri stacks two clocks to reach a court that is not a trial court — a combination no other covered state has. Texas stacks (14 days to finality, then 14 to sue, note 1) but sues in a trial court that retries the facts. Virginia has two numbers that overlap and reconcile with nothing (note 26). Missouri's are cleanly sequential and land in the appellate court directly: the commission's decision "shall become final ten days after the date of notification or mailing" (§ 288.200.2), and "[w]ithin twenty days after a decision of the commission has become final" the appeal goes to "the appellate court having jurisdiction in the area where the claimant... reside[s]," or the Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals for non-residents and cases without a claimant (§ 288.210). Two further details: the notice of appeal is filed with the commission, not the court — the same posture as Arizona's filing with the clerk of the appeals board (note 34), though Missouri's appeal is of right and Arizona's is not — and the agency's own page describes the whole thing as a flat "30 days," a total that is arithmetically close and mechanically different. units/MO.md F3 states the statutory structure and flags the practice page's version rather than adopting it.

43. Missouri is the fifth distinct way written law fails in this table: one statute expressly overriding another's protection, with nothing left to say what survives. The catalogue so far: a stale edition of a current statute hosted by the agency itself (Pennsylvania, note 9); a freshly amended statute naming a body abolished years earlier (Michigan, note 16); a statute out of step with itself on what its own appeal body is called (Virginia, note 25); a regulation squarely at odds with the statute it implements, in both directions (Massachusetts note 29, Arizona note 33). Missouri's is none of these. § 288.070.8 states a real claimant protection — benefits paid while an appeal was pending "shall be considered as having been due and payable regardless of any redetermination or decision," unless the reversal finds the claimant "willfully failed to disclose or falsified" a disqualifying fact. § 288.381.1 then begins "[t]he provisions of subsection 8 of section 288.070 notwithstanding" and makes those very benefits "collectible by the division" under § 288.380.12 and .13 — subsections covering nondisclosure or misrepresentation and the division's own "error or omission or... lack of knowledge of material fact." The override is explicit and by section number, so this is not an accident of drafting; what is missing is any text saying what § 288.070.8 still protects once § 288.381.1 has taken the ordinary reversal case away from it. Both sections are current — § 288.070 effective 2008, §§ 288.380 and 288.381 effective 2016 — so no edition question resolves it (note 9's failure mode). units/MO.md E2 records the conflict and declines to pick a winner, which is the only honest reading available from the text alone.

44. Wisconsin names its late-appeal standard twice and defines it nowhere — then its agency renames it. Wis. Stat. § 108.09(4)(c) and Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.04 both ask only whether the appeal was late "for a reason beyond the appellant's control." Neither defines the phrase, and unlike North Carolina and Virginia (note 24) the problem is not that one instrument names a standard the other ignores — statute and rule agree exactly, and the agreement is the point: there is nothing to play them off against. The test also runs in two steps, the first of which disposes of the appeal on paper. The tribunal "shall review the appellant's written reasons," and if those reasons, "when taken as true and construed most favorably to the appellant, do not constitute a reason beyond the appellant's control," it "may dismiss the appeal without a hearing." A claimant's one shot is therefore the written explanation attached to the late appeal, before anyone has heard from them. Meanwhile DWD's own appeals page puts the same question as whether the claimant had "good cause," glossing it back to "a reason beyond your control" — so a claimant researching their own case meets a phrase that appears nowhere in the operative law, and the phrase that does appear is the narrower-sounding one. units/WI.md B4 records both and does not treat them as established equivalents. Compare Massachusetts, where the twelve enumerated excuses at least tell a claimant what kind of story counts (note 29).

45. Wisconsin is the first covered state where the same fee number appears in the statute and in the rule — and the two instruments still do not say the same thing. (Vermont, added at wake 62, writes the same figure, the same aggregation and the same base in its statute alone — and then makes the two opposite choices: it includes the fee for a court appearance where Wisconsin excludes it, and it requires no prior approval where Wisconsin does. Note 146.) Both cap a representative at 10% of "the maximum benefits at issue," both take it "in the aggregate," and both allow more only on the department's prior approval (Wis. Stat. § 108.09(8)(b); Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.18). Everywhere else in this table the published figure lives in one instrument only (note 35). The redundancy is not quite redundant, though: the statute also covers disputes over "a penalty imposed under s. 108.04 (11) (bh)" and expressly excludes "any fee charged for representation before a court of law," and the rule does neither, while the rule supplies a waiver procedure — a written request to the Bureau of Legal Affairs, with the department directed to consider whether extended or other federal benefits are at issue — that the statute does not. The statute is also the broader source on who may represent a party: it contemplates "counsel or another agent," which settles the non-attorney question at the statutory level rather than leaving it to DWD 140.02. Wisconsin pairs this with two priced, waivable record fees where Minnesota and Missouri leave theirs unpriced (note 39): $7.00 for a copy of the hearing recording, waivable if the department is satisfied the person cannot pay (DWD 140.21(2)), and 20 cents per page for commission copies, waivable on a showing of financial inability (LIRC 1.08). The one number Wisconsin does not publish is the § 108.09(5)(b) transcript fee, which the statute leaves to a commission rule that ch. LIRC 1 does not appear to contain — recorded in units/WI.md C3 as an absence after a section-by- section read, not as a "none."

46. Wisconsin answers "benefits pending appeal" for both directions in a single clause — and Maryland, added a wake later, turns out to do the same thing by an even quieter route. (Amended when Maryland was added; this note previously said no other covered state did it.) This is the field this reference most often has to assemble from inference or from an agency page — Pennsylvania's rests on no statute at all (note 12), and Missouri's rests on two statutes that contradict each other (note 43). Wisconsin § 108.09(9)(a) directs that benefits "be paid promptly in accordance with the department's determination or the decision of an appeal tribunal, the commission or a reviewing court, notwithstanding the pendency" of the period to request a hearing, to petition the commission, or to commence judicial action, or of any such proceeding. The trick is that it never mentions who appealed: it fixes payment to whichever decision is currently operative, and § 108.09(9)(b) makes the most recently issued one control. Both halves then fall out of one sentence — a denied claimant is not paid while the denial stands, and an allowed claimant keeps being paid through the employer's appeal, because the allowance stays operative until superseded. DWD's practice page states the employer-appeal half in as many words, and agrees. The symmetry has a price on the other side: § 108.09(9)(c) makes anything paid that the final decision would not have allowed an "erroneous payment," and § 108.22(8)(c)2 then forecloses the obvious waiver argument by providing that a determination "amended, modified or reversed" on appeal "shall not be treated as establishing a departmental error." Virginia's mandatory waiver excludes the reversal-on-appeal case the same way (note 27); Wisconsin reaches the result through the definition of departmental error rather than through an exclusion in the waiver clause.

    Maryland's § 8-808(a)(1) has the same shape and less machinery: the Secretary "promptly shall pay benefits to a claimant in accordance with a determination until it has been modified or reversed by a later determination or decision," notwithstanding §§ 8-805 and 8-806 and Subtitle 10. Wisconsin's clause at least names what it is overriding — the pendency of a hearing request, a petition, or a judicial action. Maryland's never mentions an appeal at all. It works purely by making the operative determination the only thing that matters, and the two halves fall out of that: a denial pays nothing while the claimant appeals it, and an allowance keeps paying while the employer appeals it, because neither appeal has yet modified or reversed anything. The "notwithstanding" is doing the load-bearing work, and what it names is telling — §§ 8-805 and 8-806 are the filing and determination sections, which is to say the sections an appeal is taken under. So the drafting styles now run three ways: name the pendency (Wisconsin, Illinois, Virginia, Missouri), name the operative determination and say nothing about appeals (Maryland), or say nothing at all and leave it to inference (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Washington, North Carolina). What Maryland does not share with Wisconsin is the tidy back end: where Wisconsin forecloses the waiver argument by defining departmental error, Maryland simply leaves § 8-809 outside the "notwithstanding" clause's reach, so the money paid during the employer's appeal is recoverable on ordinary overpayment terms with no special rule either way (note 51).

47. Wisconsin's two appeal clocks are extended by three different holiday lists, and one of the rules supplying them reads older than the statute it implements. The first-level weekend and holiday extension exists only in Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.01(2)(a), which extends a deadline falling on "any of the holidays enumerated under ss. 230.35 (4) (a) and 995.20, Stats." Those are two different lists doing two different jobs — § 995.20 is the general legal-holidays section, § 230.35(4)(a) sets the days state offices close — and neither contains the other: § 995.20 has Juneteenth, November 11, the third Monday in February, the second Monday in October and two election days; § 230.35(4)(a) instead has December 24 and December 31. Because the rule cites them conjunctively, the operative set is the union, which no single source states. The second-level clock is extended by a third list, enumerated directly in Wis. Admin. Code § LIRC 1.02 — close to § 995.20 but not identical, since it carries December 24 and 31 like the state-office list. That same rule runs the 21 days "from the date of mailing," and its operative sentence was last amended in 2006, while § 108.09(6)(a) runs them from electronic delivery or mailing and § 108.09's amending acts continue to 2017. This is note 9's failure mode in a milder form — not a stale copy of a current statute, but a current rule that predates the statutory language it sits under. units/WI.md B2 and F1 record the gap; the statutory trigger is the one to plan around.

48. Maryland's appeal chain is written down twice, in the same code, and the two versions disagree by five days — and that was done on purpose in a single act. Md. Code, Labor & Empl. § 8-806(g) and (h) describe an appeal to the Lower Appeals Division and then review by the Board of Appeals. Subtitle 5 (§§ 8-501 to 8-508) and Subtitle 5A (§§ 8-5A-01 to 8-5A-12) describe the same two steps again, in different words. Chapter 660 of the Acts of 2008 (House Bill 432) is where this comes from: it renumbered the old Subtitle 5 as Subtitle 5A, enacted a new Subtitle 5 for the Lower Appeals Division, amended § 8-806(e)(2) and (g)(1)–(3) to point them at the new Division — and then reenacted § 8-806(g)(4)–(6) and the whole of § 8-806(h) with no change marks at all, leaving the older description standing. The act took effect October 1, 2008 with no contingency and no sunset. The disagreement a reader can actually hit is at the hand-off to the Board: § 8-806(g)(6) says the hearing examiner's decision is final unless review is begun within 15 days, § 8-508(e) says it is final after 10 days unless review is begun under § 8-5A-10, and § 8-5A-10(a)(1) then gives 15 days to file. This is note 43's problem — two current provisions contradicting each other — but with a cleaner provenance: Missouri's conflict has to be inferred from two sections that name each other, while Maryland's can be traced to the page of the enrolled bill where the old text was reprinted unchanged. The Department does not treat it as a problem: its decisions digest on this very question is titled "Timely and Valid Appeal - Sections 8-806, 8-508, 8-5A-10" and cites all three together without remarking on it. A related, smaller symptom is that the same 15-day first-level deadline is stated four times with four different triggers — "the mailing or other delivery of the notice" (§ 8-806(e)(1)(i)), "the date the notice … is sent" (§ 8-806(g)(1)), "mailed … or otherwise is delivered" (§ 8-508(a)(1)), and "mailed or otherwise sent" (COMAR 09.32.11.01B(1)) — with nothing saying which controls if a notice were generated on one date and posted on another. Compare note 9 (Pennsylvania hosting a stale copy of its own statute) and note 47 (a Wisconsin rule that predates the statute it implements): those are lag. This is duplication that was enacted and then left alone for eighteen years.

49. Maryland grants the late-appeal power twice, to two different officials, and defines it nowhere. The statute gives it to the head of the division — "[t]he chief hearing examiner of the Lower Appeals Division, for good cause, may extend the time for an appeal" (§ 8-806(e)(2)) — and the rule gives it to whoever is hearing the case: the period "may be extended by the Hearing Examiner for good cause shown" (COMAR 09.32.11.01B(4)). Neither defines good cause, neither lists factors, and neither sets a deadline for asking. On the spectrum this table has been building, that puts Maryland at the permissive-but-unguided end: Texas and two others have no excuse at all (note 3), Massachusetts enumerates twelve excuses (note 29), Missouri states both the standard and who bears it (note 40), Wisconsin's rule and its agency page use two different phrases for the same test (note 44) — and Maryland simply says "good cause" twice, in two instruments, naming two different deciders. units/MD.md B4 records both without reconciling them.

50. Maryland is the clearest case in this table of an agency's own pages contradicting its own rules — three times, in three different directions. First, filing at the second level: COMAR 09.32.06.01A(2) says an appeal to the Board "may not be filed by electronic mail," while the Board's own page tells filers that appeals "can be filed via email" and gives the address it will accept them at. The rule's escape hatch — "other method of transmission established by the Board of Appeals" — may well cover it, but the page and the rule state opposite things on their face. Second, recordings: COMAR 09.32.11.02E makes a party's own recording a matter for the hearing examiner's discretion, while the Department's hearing page tells parties they "are prohibited from making unofficial recordings." Third, currency: the decisions digest cites COMAR 09.32.11.01B(3) for the good-cause extension and B(2) for the filing-date list, where the current rule numbers them B(4) and B(3), and calls the filing date the "earlier" of the listed dates where the rule says "earliest" — the marks of a page written against the pre-2018 chapter. Note 20 (New Jersey) is the case where the agency page is the only source for a rule; note 44 (Wisconsin) is where it paraphrases loosely. Maryland is the case where it is checkably out of step, which is worth knowing because it is also the most readable description the state publishes.

51. Maryland's waiver test is conjunctive, and the clause that keeps benefits flowing does not protect them afterwards. § 8-808(a)(1) pays by whichever determination is operative (note 46), so an allowance keeps paying through the employer's appeal — but the "notwithstanding" reaches only §§ 8-805, 8-806 and Subtitle 10, not § 8-809, so a reversal leaves the money recoverable on ordinary overpayment terms. What makes those terms strict is the and: waiver is approved where the claimant "(1) Is without fault; and (2) Lacks the ability to pay now and in the foreseeable future, or is likely to be below the federal minimum poverty level" (COMAR 09.32.07.05A), with the claimant carrying the burden of proof (.05C). Most states in this table ask about fault and then about equity — Michigan's is mandatory where repayment would be "contrary to equity and good conscience" (note 31), North Carolina's pairs equity with a defined hardship test — but Maryland requires both an absence of fault and a means test, so a blameless claimant who can afford to repay does not qualify. Three structural limits sit around it: the application is due within 30 days of the notice absent good cause, the Secretary may grant a waiver "only within 1 year of the initial determination establishing the overpayment" (stayed by appeal), and no recovery determination may be made "later than 3 years after the date that the benefits were paid" (§ 8-809(f)(2)) — a shorter outside limit than New Jersey's four years or Massachusetts' six. Collection itself pauses while a waiver request or an appeal of its denial is pending (COMAR 09.32.07.04), which is a protection several states in this table do not state at all.

52. Maryland is the first covered state where a deadline landing on a Saturday appears not to move. Every other state examined so far extends a filing deadline that falls on a weekend or a holiday, whether by a UI-specific rule or, as in New York and Minnesota, by a general one. Maryland has a general one too — Gen. Prov. § 1-302(b)(1) — but it reads: the last day counts "unless … it is a Sunday or legal holiday." Saturday appears in the section only in a second branch, § 1-302(b)(2), which applies where "the act to be done is the filing of a paper in court" — which an appeal to the Lower Appeals Division is not. Nor does Saturday arrive through the definition: "legal holiday" is a closed list of named dates in Gen. Prov. § 1-111(a), and Saturday is not among them. Neither Title 8 nor COMAR 09.32.11 supplies a weekend rule of its own. So on the sources read, a 15-day appeal period whose fifteenth day is a Saturday expires on that Saturday. units/MD.md B2 records this as an inference drawn from the absence of an applicable extension rather than from any provision saying so, which is the right way to hold it — but it is the kind of absence that costs someone an appeal, and it is the reason the blanket statement at the top of this page now carries an exception.

    (Amended when Connecticut was added.) Maryland keeps the exception, but Connecticut shows that the sentence above was measuring the wrong thing. Every other state examined so far extends a filing deadline that falls on a weekend or a holiday is true of Connecticut in outcome and false of it in mechanism: Connecticut has no weekend rule and no holiday rule, only § 31-241(a)(2)'s extension for a last day falling "on any day when the offices of the Employment Security Division are not open for business." A Saturday deadline moves in Connecticut because the offices are shut, not because it is a Saturday. So Connecticut is not a second Maryland, and it is not one of the calendar-rule states either — see note 55.

53. Connecticut's appeal rules stopped being amended in 1997 and its appeal statute did not — so the rule and the statute now say different things about two of the first questions a claimant asks. Every section of the regulation chapter that governs these appeals, all four Articles and sixty-one sections of it, carries one of two effective dates — June 23, 1986 or January 1, 1988 — followed by "Amended October 27, 1997." Not one carries a date after 1997. The General Assembly, meanwhile, amended the chapter in 2012 and again in 2016, and both amendments landed on provisions the frozen rules implement. On the trigger for the twenty-one-day clock: P.A. 16-169 struck "mailed to his last-known address" from § 31-241(a) and substituted "provided to the claimant or any of such employers" — the statute's own History paragraph records the substitution in those words — while Regs. § 31-237g-15(a) still runs the clock from "the date such decision was mailed to such party's last-known address." On whether the hearing is by telephone: P.A. 12-125 rewrote § 31-237j(b) to say referee proceedings "shall be conducted (1) by telephone or other electronic means, or (2) at the request of either party, in person," while Regs. § 31-237g-17(a) still makes in-person "the preferred manner" for an intrastate appeal and requires a party to show good cause to get a telephone hearing instead. A party reading only the statute would think in-person requires a request; a party reading only the rule would think telephone does. Nothing in either instrument says which governs, and units/CT.md resolves neither.

    This is a fifth distinct way written law fails in this table, and it is worth separating from the four already catalogued at note 29. Pennsylvania's problem is a stale edition of a current statute hosted by the agency (note 9); Michigan's is a freshly amended statute naming a body that no longer exists (note 16); Virginia's is a statute out of step with itself after a half-finished renaming (note 25); Massachusetts' is a regulation drafted squarely against the statute it implements (note 29). Connecticut's is none of those: the rules were correct when written and were simply never revisited, so the divergence was manufactured by amending one instrument and not the other. Wisconsin has the nearest shape (note 47, a current rule predating the statutory language it sits under), but Wisconsin's gap is a lag inside a single question; Connecticut's runs across the two questions that decide when you must file and how you will be heard. The cheapest way for a later wake to re-check the premise is the date line at the foot of each Cornell LII section page.

    (Amended when Oregon was added.) Oregon supplies a sixth shape, and it is the one hardest to detect by reading, because nothing about the text is wrong. Oregon's appeal rules are current, several were amended within the last decade, and they do not contradict the statute. The failure is purely one of location: the only figure capping what a claimant's representative may charge sits in subsection (8) of OAR 471-040-0020, a rule captioned "Subpoenas" (note 56). The five shapes already catalogued all involve text that is stale, superseded, self-contradictory, or drafted against its parent statute — a reader who finds the provision can see that something is wrong with it. Oregon's provision is correct and current, and the defect is that a reader following the statute's own signposts will not find it: ORS 657.295(2) points to "an amount approved by the director" and names no rule, and the rule that supplies the amount announces itself as being about something else. That has a consequence for how this project reads every other state. The four modes at note 29 and Connecticut's at note 53 are all detectable by reading the provisions carefully; this one is detectable only by reading provisions there was no reason to open — which is why note 35 now treats the other approval without a published figure states as unverified rather than confirmed.

54. One of Connecticut's postmark rules is not in the unemployment chapter, and it reaches three of the four appeal deadlines but not the fourth. Section 31-241(a)(3) says a mailed appeal is timely if it bears "a legible United States postal service postmark," and excludes private postage meter dates — which reads like a bar on private carriers. It is not one. Conn. Gen. Stat. § 1-2a, in Title 1, provides that any reference to the United States mail or a postmark "shall be treated as including a reference to any delivery service designated by the Secretary of the Treasury" under I.R.C. § 7502 — which is why the Department's claimant guide names DHL, FedEx and UPS as acceptable in the same breath as saying only a USPS postmark fixes a mailing date. Read against chapter 567 alone those two sentences contradict each other; read with § 1-2a they do not. But § 1-2a works by naming sections, and the list is not complete. It names §§ 31-241, 31-248 and 31-249a — the first-level appeal, the referee's finality clock and the Board's — and it does not name § 31-273, whose overpayment and fraud-penalty appeals carry the same twenty-one days, the same "provided" trigger, the same good-cause cross-reference and the same postmark language, copied almost word for word from § 31-241(a). On the face of the two statutes, a private carrier's date mark establishes timeliness for the appeal from a denial and not for the appeal from the overpayment determination that follows it. Nothing read says whether the omission was deliberate. Chapter 567 gives no notice of any of this except a one-line cross-reference note printed under § 31-248, and units/CT.md records the currency of the IRS carrier list itself as unverified. This is a different hazard from the stale-edition and statute-versus-rule problems elsewhere in these notes: here both instruments are current and consistent, and the trap is that one of them is filed somewhere a reader of the unemployment chapter has no reason to look.

55. Connecticut extends a deadline by asking whether the office was open, not what day it was — and it used to do the other thing. The only extension in the chapter is § 31-241(a)(2): the last day moves to the next business day "if the last day for filing an appeal falls on any day when the offices of the Employment Security Division are not open for business." No Saturday, no Sunday, no holiday, and no cross-reference to a general computation-of-time statute. In ordinary operation the result matches a calendar rule, because state offices are shut on weekends and holidays — but the two can come apart in both directions: an office closed for a reason having nothing to do with the calendar extends the deadline, and a day the offices are open does not, whatever the date. Connecticut is therefore a third shape alongside the calendar-rule majority and Maryland's Saturday gap (note 52). (Amended when New Mexico was added: Connecticut was for many wakes the only covered state whose weekend protection is contingent on an administrative fact rather than a date. New Mexico is the second, by the same mechanism and from a rule that is not in its appeals rule at all — note 130.)

    Two things make this more than a curiosity. First, it is deliberate: the statute's own History records that the 1965 act "specified that 7-day period for appeals excludes Sundays and holidays," that the 1967 act added the office-closure extension alongside it, and that P.A. 74-229 then extended the window to fourteen days, "deleting former exclusion for Sundays and holidays." Connecticut had a calendar rule for nine years, ran both mechanisms in parallel for seven, and repealed the calendar one. No other covered state's history shows a legislature choosing between these two mechanisms. Second, the statute and the rule do not describe the same closure. The statute says "the offices of the Employment Security Division," plural and division-wide; Regs. § 31-237g-15(a) says "the office in which the appeal was filed," singular. Whether one office shut for a local reason while the others stay open extends anything is not addressed anywhere read, and units/CT.md B2 records it as an open question rather than resolving it.

    (Amended when Oregon was added; corrected at wake 57.) Connecticut keeps the claim, and on the evidence this reference holds it needs narrowing only once. Connecticut is not the only covered state whose appeal deadline is protected by an administrative fact rather than a date — Illinois, Kentucky's regulation and New Mexico do the same, and note 130 now carries the list. (That sentence read "Connecticut is still the only covered state ..." until wake 68.) Oregon's rule on changing the assigned administrative law judge runs on ten business days, and OAR 471-060-0005(4)(a) defines those by office closure with a non-exhaustive calendar list inside it — both of Connecticut's mechanisms in a single sentence, which no other covered state manages. But Oregon does not apply it to the deadline that matters most: its two first-level appeal clocks get no extension of any kind (note 57), so the state whose rules contain the most complete version of this machinery is also one of the states that leaves its appeal deadlines wholly unprotected. (Withdrawn at wake 57, restored at wake 58 — and the narrowing of the sentence before this one goes with it.) Wake 57 found this page quoting OAR 471-060-0005(4)(a) as excluding "days of scheduled office closure" with the calendar days a non-exhaustive subset, and withdrew both the quotation and the claim built on it, because no unit carried that wording. Wake 58 read the rule. The wording is the rule's; what was wrong was only that it had never been put in a unit, and it now is. The subsection reads: "business days do not include days of scheduled office closure. Scheduled days of office closure include, but are not limited to, Saturdays and the legal holidays identified in ORS 187.010 and 187.020, including Sundays." So Oregon does write both mechanisms into one sentence — an office-closure test with a non-exhaustive calendar list inside it, the only such construction in this table. Connecticut still keeps the claim above, because the claim is about appeal deadlines: Oregon's sentence governs a request to change the assigned administrative law judge, and Oregon's two first-level appeal clocks get no extension of any kind (note 57). The point Connecticut owns is narrower than only state to use an office-closure rule and survives intact: it is the only covered state whose appeal deadline itself turns on whether an office was open.

56. Oregon's only limit on what a claimant's representative may charge is in a rule called "Subpoenas." ORS 657.295(2) says a representative may not "charge or receive for the services more than an amount approved by the director," and stops. The amount is in OAR 471-040-0020(8): "no more than 25% of an individual's benefits affected by the administrative decision on a disputed claim and no more than 25% of the maximum benefit amount payable as defined under 657.150(5)." Subsections (1) through (7) of that rule are about who may ask for a subpoena, what the request should show, who must serve it, and what a subpoenaed witness is paid in fees and mileage. Subsection (8) is about none of those things. Nothing in ORS 657.295 names the rule, and nothing in the rule's caption or its first seven subsections suggests it. The rulemaking history at the foot of the section shows the rule has been amended eight times since 1976, most recently in 2014, so this is not a fossil — the fee cap has survived repeated revisits of a subpoena rule without being moved. Two consequences are drawn out at notes 35 and 53: it adds a mechanism to the fee-regulation taxonomy, and it is a sixth and distinct way for written law to fail a reader, in which the text is correct and simply cannot be found.

57. Oregon extends neither of its first-level deadlines for a weekend or a holiday, and its general computation statute does not reach them. (Vermont, added at wake 62, is the second covered state where no extension was found in any primary source — note 147 — and the shape differs: Oregon's general statute confines itself to acts performed in a court, while Vermont's reaches everything and simply says nothing about the last day of a period.) Nothing in ORS 657.266, 657.269, 657.270 or 657.875, and nothing in the fourteen sections of OAR chapter 471 division 40, moves a deadline that lands on a Saturday, a Sunday or a legal holiday. The obvious candidate does not apply by its own terms. ORS 174.120(1) governs time "as provided in the civil and criminal procedure statutes"; subsection (2), which carries the Saturday-and-holiday carve-out, is written "for the purposes of determining whether a person has complied with a statutory time limitation governing an act to be performed in a circuit court, the Oregon Tax Court, the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court"; and subsection (4) confines (2) and (3) to "statutes of limitation and other procedural statutes governing civil and criminal proceedings." A request for hearing is filed with the Director of the Employment Department, which is none of those, and neither appeal statute cross-references § 174.120. This is a recorded absence after a defined search, not a statement that no such rule exists anywhere in Oregon law — but it is the second covered state, after Connecticut, whose weekend protection does not come from a calendar rule, and the first whose first-level deadline appears to have no protection at all. What Oregon has instead is a filing-date rule that is unusually generous at the other end: OAR 471-040-0005(4) fixes the date of filing method by method, and where a mailed request bears no postmark it falls back to "the most probable date of mailing" rather than to the date of receipt or to untimeliness. Who determines that date, and on what evidence, the rule does not say.

58. Oregon is the only covered state that says how long "a reasonable time" is. Every state with a good-cause late-appeal exception has to answer two questions: what excuses the delay, and how promptly the party must act once the excuse ends. All the rest answer the first and leave the second open or unstated. ORS 657.875 is the open version — the period "may be extended, upon a showing of good cause therefor, a reasonable time under the circumstances of each particular case." OAR 471-040-0010(3) closes it: "'A reasonable time,' is seven days after the circumstances that prevented a timely filing ceased to exist." The same seven days is repeated for the second level at OAR 471-041-0070(2)(b), so the rule holds at both stages. A late appellant in Oregon therefore has to clear two separate hurdles rather than one, and the second is a hard number. See note 29 for how the rest of Oregon's good-cause rule — an express exclusion list, and a per-se rule keyed to the Department's own failure to serve a limited English proficient party — compares with Massachusetts' and Connecticut's. (Rechecked when Colorado was added.) Colorado does not falsify this. It has no "reasonable time" phrase to convert: rule 12.1 never asks how promptly the party acted once the excuse cleared, and its 180-day bar (note 61) is an outer limit measured from the original deadline, not from the end of the obstacle. The two mechanisms answer different questions and Oregon's remains the only answer to this one. (Rechecked when Nevada was added.) Nevada does not falsify it either, and falsifies it less than Colorado did. NRS 612.495(1) grants the extension in five words — "may be extended for good cause shown" — and neither chapter 612 nor NAC chapter 612 defines good cause, states factors, or says anything about how promptly a party must act once the obstacle lifts. Nevada does not answer the second question; it does not clearly ask it.

59. Colorado's weekend rule is real, is not in the unemployment chapter, and the chapter restates it for the one clock that did not need it. Nothing in article 74 or in 7 CCR 1101-2 extends the twenty-day appeal deadline when day twenty lands on a Saturday, a Sunday or a holiday. C.R.S. § 2-4-108(2) does — "[i]f the last day of any period is a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday, the period is extended to include the next day which is not a Saturday, Sunday, or legal holiday" — sitting in title 2, article 4, part 1, the general rules for construing Colorado statutes. Article 74 never cites it. What article 74 does contain is one express weekend-and-holiday clause, attached to the seven calendar days a party has to answer a claim before the deputy decides: "[i]f the seventh calendar day falls on a weekend or a state holiday, the date must be moved to the first working day immediately following such weekend or holiday" (§ 8-74-102(1)). So the chapter spells the rule out where the general statute would already have supplied it, and leaves it unstated where a reader is most likely to look. The Department publishes the next-business-day rule for the appeal deadline on four separate pages, in the same words each time, citing nothing. This is the third instance of the shape note 54 named in Connecticut and note 57 in Oregon: the provision that decides a state's weekend question lives outside the chapter its reader is reading. The three outcomes differ — Connecticut's § 1-2a widens a postmark rule, Oregon's ORS 174.120 turns out not to reach the deadline at all, Colorado's § 2-4-108 does reach it — but the failure mode is identical, and in Colorado's case the misreading is the safe one only by luck: a claimant who reads article 74 and concludes the deadline does not move will file early, while one who reads it and concludes there is no protection may not file at all.

60. Colorado fixes both ends of the clock against the appealing party, and says so. The twenty days start on the division's own act — "the date of personal delivery, the date of transmission as recorded by the division, if notification is made by electronic means, or the date of mailing of a decision" (§ 8-74-106(1)(a)) — not on the party's receipt; and they end on the division's receipt of the appeal, not on a postmark: the appeal "must be received by the division" (§ 8-74-103(1)), and rule 1.8 makes the date of filing "the date received, if mailed or filed in person." Most covered states give ground at one end or the other. Wisconsin counts an appeal timely if received or postmarked (note 47); Maryland counts the earliest of hand delivery, postmark, the date written on the appeal, or electronic receipt (note 48); Oregon falls back to "the most probable date of mailing" where a mailed request bears no postmark (note 57). Colorado gives ground at neither, and the Department states the consequence in one sentence its rules do not contain: "The postmark date of your appeal does not count." An appeal mailed on day nineteen is late. That is not a defect — it is a clearly drafted rule, consistently published — but it makes Colorado's nominal twenty days shorter in practice than a nominal twenty days elsewhere, which is exactly the kind of difference a deadline table cannot show.

61. Colorado is the only covered state where the late appellant starts ahead. Everywhere else in this table a party who files late must show good cause to be heard. Colorado inverts the burden by rule: "[w]henever an interested party files an untimely appeal from a deputy's decision, a rebuttable presumption of good cause shall be established and a hearing shall be scheduled unless the appeal was received more than 180 days beyond the expiration of the timely filing period" (rule 12.1.3.1). The hearing is set first. The non-appealing party must object at the hearing to displace the presumption, and failing to do so waives the objection. Only then does the hearing officer apply the six substantive factors of rule 12.1.8 — which include whether there was administrative error by the division and whether any other party "has been prejudiced," prejudice being defined in the rule as being prevented or substantially hindered from presenting probative evidence. Against that, Colorado draws a harder outer line than any state here except Florida. Beyond 180 days good cause cannot be established, no hearing is scheduled, the appeal is dismissed and the deputy's decision becomes final (rule 12.1.3.2), and the bar is restated generally: "no act subject to this section shall be permitted more than 180 days beyond the applicable timely date" (rule 12.1.8.9). The only comparable outer bar in this table is Florida's, which is written into the statute rather than a rule and set at five years — "an appeal may not be filed more than 5 years after the date of the mailing of the determination" (Fla. Stat. § 443.151(4)(b)3). Colorado's is roughly six months. So Colorado is simultaneously the most forgiving covered state inside its window and among the least forgiving outside it — and the two rules are in the same part of the same regulation, three subsections apart. Note that the presumption attaches only to an untimely appeal from a deputy; an untimely appeal from a hearing officer goes to the panel, which decides whether good cause has been shown on the party's own statement of reasons (rule 12.1.3.3), with no presumption at all. The burden flips back on the way up.

    (Wake 57, resolved wake 58.) Rules 12.1.3.2, 12.1.3.3 and 12.1.8 had been quoted here in wording that appeared nowhere in units/CO.md, so wake 57 dropped the marks and kept the substance. Wake 58 read 7 CCR 1101-2-12.1 and put all three subsections into units/CO.md as source text. The substance above was right in every particular, and two details the note had not carried are worth adding. The six factors are what the division or the panel "consider," not elements to be proved. And part XII is not a general good-cause power at all: rule 12.1.2 confines it to cases where "a particular section of the act or regulations other than this part XII of the regulations specifically permits an untimely action" — which is why Colorado's presumption reaches the late appeal (§ 8-74-106(1)(b) supplies the permission) and not the judicial-review deadline. (Rechecked when Nevada was added.) Nevada does not disturb it. Its late appellant carries the ordinary burden — the period "may be extended for good cause shown" (NRS 612.495(1)) — with nothing reversing it and no outer bar either way. Colorado is still the only covered state that starts the late appellant ahead.

62. Nevada runs its whole chain on one number, and no other covered state uses it. Eleven days to appeal a determination to an Appeal Tribunal (NRS 612.495(1)); eleven for that determination to become final if nobody does (NRS 612.485(1)); eleven from the Tribunal's decision to the Board of Review (NRS 612.510(2)); eleven before the Board's own decision is final (NRS 612.525(1)); eleven again to commence the action in district court (NRS 612.530(1)). The figure 11 appears nowhere else in this table — the nearest neighbours are Massachusetts' 10 and Texas' and Wisconsin's 14. The last two of Nevada's five are the shape note 1 describes for Texas: a finality period and then a separate, equally long filing period, stacked rather than concurrent, so the window to sue opens around day 12 and closes around day 22 after notification. Nevada is the second covered state with an equal stack; Texas is the first (two 14-day clocks, note 1). Missouri stacks too but unevenly — 10 days to finality, then 20 to file (note 42). Nevada also writes its own weekend-and-holiday rule into the appeal statute, at NRS 612.495(3), rather than borrowing one from a general construction statute the way Colorado (note 59) and Connecticut (note 54) do — and Nevada has nothing to borrow: NRS chapter 0, the state's general rules of construction, contains no computation-of-time provision at all.

63. Nevada conditions the second level on how the first level came out — the third covered state to do so, and the harshest version. (Amended at wake 45: Louisiana is a fourth, and it writes both of the triggers this note describes as split between New Jersey and Maryland into one sentence — see note 109.) "An appeal to the Board of Review by any party must be allowed as a matter of right if the Appeal Tribunal's decision reversed or modified the Administrator's determination. In all other cases, further review must be at the discretion of the Board of Review" (NRS 612.515(1)). New Jersey (note 19) and Maryland do the same thing in different words — New Jersey adds a second as-of-right trigger where the tribunal was not unanimous, which a one-examiner tribunal like Nevada's cannot produce, and Maryland's rule turns on whether the examiner "did not affirm." All of them share the same consequence: the party who lost below and lost again at the hearing is the one with no guaranteed second look. Nevada's rules at least require the Board to say so — on refusing review because the examiner affirmed, it "shall notify the parties of their right to judicial review" (NAC 612.242(1)).

64. Nevada is the only covered state that closes its hearings. "Hearings and reviews are confidential proceedings under NRS 612.265 and are closed to the public" (NAC 612.252). No other unit in this reference records a confidentiality or closure rule for a UI appeal hearing, and Ohio's rule runs the other way: hearings under agency 4146 of its administrative code "shall be open to the public." The rest of the table is silent, which is not the same as either.

65. Nevada is the first checked instance of the category note 35 hedges. NRS 612.705(2) caps a representative's fee at "an amount approved by the Board of Review" and prints no figure — the same shape as California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Michigan, which note 35 now marks unverified because Oregon's identical-looking statute turned out to have its 25% figure buried in a rule captioned "Subpoenas." Nevada got that look: both chapters were read in full and searched for a percentage, a dollar figure, a fee schedule and any Board determination. There is no figure in either chapter. That matters more here than it would elsewhere, because charging above the unpublished amount is a misdemeanour (NRS 612.705(3)) — Nevada makes it a crime to exceed a number it does not publish. The five unverified states still need the same look.

66. South Carolina ties Massachusetts for the shortest claimant window — and does not say what kind of days it means. S.C. Code Ann. § 41-35-660 gives "ten days after the determination was mailed," and that is the whole of it: not calendar days, not business days, no rollover. The section three numbers away counts in calendar days and rolls a Saturday, Sunday or state holiday to the next business day (§ 41-35-615) — but that clock is the employer's time to answer a notice, not anyone's time to appeal. The state's general rules of construction were read for this table (title 2 ch. 7, title 15 ch. 1) and contain no computation-of-time provision at all, so there is nothing general to borrow, the way Colorado borrows C.R.S. § 2-4-108 (note 59). units/SC.md B1, B2.

67. South Carolina's second-level body is elected by the legislature. The three members of the DEW Appellate Panel "must be elected by the General Assembly, in joint session, for terms of four years" beginning in each presidential election year (§ 41-29-300(B)(2)), after a review committee has screened them. Every other second-level body in this table is appointed — usually by the governor, sometimes by an agency head, sometimes with legislative confirmation — or is simply departmental staff, or (Minnesota) the same judge reconsidering their own decision. Confirmed by reading the A3 field of all twenty-two other units. units/SC.md A3.

68. South Carolina is the only covered state where the first court is inside the executive branch. Judicial review goes to the Administrative Law Court, which its own creating statute calls "an agency and a court of record within the executive branch of the government of this State" (§ 1-23-500), on a 30-day clock (§ 41-35-750). Everywhere else in this table, leaving the agency means entering the judiciary — a trial court in thirteen states, an appellate court directly in eight, Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court in one. A South Carolina case only reaches the judicial branch at the next step, the court of appeals (§ 1-23-610(A)(1)). units/SC.md F3.

69. South Carolina's agency states a deadline rule its own law does not contain. DEW's appeals page says: "By law you must file your appeal within 10 calendar days of the mailing date listed on the determination. If the 10th day falls on a weekend or recognized holiday, the appeal period extends to the next business day." Neither half of that is in § 41-35-660, which says only "ten days"; no appeal regulation supplies either half; and there is no general computation-of-time statute to supply the rollover (note 66). Maryland's pages contradict its own rules in three places (units/MD.md), so an agency page departing from the code is not new — but Maryland's departures narrow a claimant's rights, and this one widens them. A reader relying on it is relying on the agency's practice, not on anything a reviewing body must apply. units/SC.md B2.

70. South Carolina is the third covered state to forbid a court to stop benefits, and the second to do it broadly. Once an allowance has been affirmed once, "no injunction, supersedeas, stay, or other writ or process suspending the payment of the benefits must be issued by a court" (§ 41-35-670(B)) — almost word for word Florida's § 443.151(5)(b). Washington's version is narrower, sitting inside its employer-bond provision (units/WA.md). Missouri, Nevada and Texas look similar at a glance and are not: each lets the agency order a stay, which is a different thing from denying the power to a court. units/SC.md E1. Amended at wake 31: Kentucky is a fourth, and it shows that the two mechanisms can sit in one chapter. KRS 341.420(3) closes with "No injunction, supersedeas, stay or other writ or process suspending payment of such benefits shall be issued" — again almost word for word Florida's and South Carolina's, and again naming no one who can lift it. But KRS 341.450(5) then says a petition for judicial review "shall not act as a supersedeas or stay unless the commission shall so order," which is the Missouri and Nevada shape. They are not in conflict: the first denies any court the power to stop payment of allowed benefits, the second lets the commission stay its own order pending review. South Carolina has the same pair (§§ 41-35-670(B), 41-35-750). Reading either one alone gets Kentucky wrong. units/KY.md E1, F3.

71. Five covered states shut a lay advocate out, a sixth does so by a rule its own statute contradicts, and South Carolina is the strictest of them. (Amended at wake 66: Delaware, added at wake 64, is the sixth, and only on the face of its Board's rule. 19 Del. C. § 3373(a) lets a claimant "be represented by counsel or other duly authorized agent." The Board's rule, which reaches only the Board's own hearings, lets a party "represent themselves (appear pro se)" or "be represented by an attorney-at-law duly admitted to practice law in the State of Delaware," and names no third option; 1201 § 4.3.1.2 reserves direct questioning of a witness to an attorney. Nothing read says which controls, and nothing at all governs representation at the first level, where the statute stands alone. units/DE.md D1. The count of the remaining states below is also redone at this wake: it had said twenty-four, which matched no denominator the table has ever had.) (Amended at wake 55: Idaho is the fifth, and it is the only one of the five that closes the door on one side of the case and leaves it open on the other. R.A.P.P. Rule 4(B) lets a claimant use "a duly authorized agent other than an attorney"; Rule 4(C) requires an employer entity other than a natural person to be represented by an attorney for anything beyond filing the initial appeal, and Rule 3(A) provides that appeals from employer representatives who are neither the employer's own employees nor Idaho-licensed attorneys "will not be considered." That is the exact category Kansas's K.A.R. 48-3-2(c)(1)(B) names as an allowed representative. Note also that Idaho's exclusion is at the second level only — the Commission's FAQ says such a firm may appear before the Department of Labor "as they can" and not before the Commission — which is a different shape from the other four, whose rules govern the hearing level. units/ID.md D1, G.) (Amended at wake 36: West Virginia, added at wake 34, is the third, and the counts below were two wakes stale. Amended again at wake 37: Kansas is the fourth, and it shuts the door by enumeration rather than by prohibition. K.A.R. 48-3-2(a) lets a party appear "in person and by an attorney or by an authorized representative," and (c)(1) then defines an authorized representative as a closed list of four — "(A) A union representative; (B) an employee of an unemployment compensation cost-control management firm; (C) an employee of a corporate party; or (D) a legal intern authorized to represent clients pursuant to the provisions of Kansas Supreme Court rule 719." Nothing forbids a lay advocate in terms; a lay advocate simply is not on the list. Two of the four categories are employer-side by construction — a cost-control management firm sells overpayment and charge-avoidance services to employers, and an employee of a corporate party represents that corporation — so the enumeration reads as a list of representatives who turn up rather than a considered grant. units/KS.md D1.) Reg. 47-55(A)(1) lets an individual not admitted to practice law "represent himself or herself" but says he "may not represent another person except as expressly allowed by this regulation" — and what the regulation expressly allows is attorneys, people appearing for their own employer or agency, and accountants in tax proceedings only. Union representatives may "appear and give factual information or data," which the regulation pointedly does not call representation. North Carolina is one of two other covered states to restrict this, and it leaves a route open: a non-attorney may represent a party if supervised by an attorney (units/NC.md D1). West Virginia leaves none: 84 CSR 1 § 5.4.1 gives a natural person two options, self-representation or a West Virginia-licensed attorney, and names no third category anywhere (units/WV.md D1). Of the other thirty-five, thirty-three allow a lay representative, several of them only on the condition that no fee is charged, and two leave the question open. Nebraska's statute and appeal rules say nothing about who may represent a party at the hearing, though its handbook and forms assume someone may (units/NE.md D1). Indiana's rule lists who may appear for a claimant and omits the lay person its own statute lets a claimant designate "to assist the claimant in the presentation of the claimant's case" (IC 22-4-17-3.2(d); units/IN.md D1). Kentucky, added at wake 31, lets a claimant be represented by "counsel or other agent duly authorized by such worker" and adds that the claimant "shall be afforded the opportunity to participate in the proceeding without restriction" (KRS 341.470(2)). South Carolina, meanwhile, has no fee provision of any kind — no cap, no approval requirement, nothing — which puts it with Colorado, North Carolina and Texas in note 35's empty column, and it got the full Oregon look: both chapters read end to end. units/SC.md D1, D2.

72. Kentucky's clock to court starts on a different event from its clocks to the referee and the commission — and the agency's own page contradicts itself about which. The two administrative deadlines run "after the date such determination was mailed" and "after the date of mailing of such decision" (KRS 341.420(2), (4)). The judicial-review deadline runs "within twenty (20) days after the date of the decision of the commission" (KRS 341.450(1)) — from when the decision was made, not from when it was sent. The Office of Unemployment Insurance's Benefits Appeals page states that deadline twice, a few lines apart, and gets it both ways: its bullet summary says "within twenty (20) days of the mailing date of the Order," while its own block quotation of KRS 341.450, further down the same page, contains no reference to mailing at all. The same quotation also drops "or reimbursing employer account" from the venue clause. This is the Maryland and South Carolina pattern again — an agency page read against the law it summarises — with the difference that here the page carries the correction to its own error a few lines below the error. units/KY.md F3.

73. In two covered states the window narrows as the case climbs. Kentucky gives thirty days to the referee, thirty more to the commission, and then twenty to a circuit court; Missouri gives thirty to the Labor and Industrial Relations Commission and twenty to the Court of Appeals (units/MO.md F1, F3). Everywhere else in this table the judicial-review window is as long as the second-level administrative one or longer — often much longer, as in California's six months. New York inverts within the administrative levels (30 then 20); Kentucky and Missouri invert at the courthouse door, which is the harder step to take.

74. Kentucky excuses a late appeal nowhere, and the two rules that look like they might do not. KRS 341.420, 341.430, 341.440 and 787 KAR 1:110 were read in full: nothing extends the thirty days, and nothing states a standard for taking an appeal filed on day thirty-one. Two neighbouring provisions use the words "good cause" for something else — rescheduling a hearing in a case already appealed on time (787 KAR 1:110 Section 2(2)(c), whose enumerated examples are current employment, medical emergency, death of a family member, and acts of God), and reopening after a party who did appeal failed to appear (Section 5(5)(a), seven days). The only text about an untimely appeal runs the other way and is in the employer's separate track: the commission "shall ... [d]eny the appeal as untimely." That puts Kentucky with Illinois, Massachusetts's absolute bar and Minnesota's day 46 rather than with the good-cause states. units/KY.md B4.

75. Kentucky is the seventh answer to note 35's question, and the second — after Oregon — where going to look actually found the figure. KRS 341.470(2) ends "no counsel or agent shall either charge or receive for such service more than an amount approved by the commission," naming no number, which is exactly the shape that left CA, NY, FL, MA and MI in note 35's unverified column. The number is in 787 KAR 1:120: twenty percent "of the maximum amount of potential benefits payable with respect to the claim under adjudication," matching Connecticut's cap and below Ohio's, Oregon's and Virginia's 25%. Two things then make Kentucky's version unlike any other in the table. Section 2 of the same regulation disposes of the approval requirement the statute created — a fee within the cap "shall be deemed to have been approved by the commission," so the approval never has to be sought. And the cap is criminal: KRS 341.990(4) makes violating KRS 341.470(2), the subsection containing the fee limit, "a Class A misdemeanor." Three other covered states make charging an unlawful fee a crime: California (units/CA.md D2); Maine, added at wake 36, whose 26 M.R.S. § 1044(2) carries the fee limit and ends "Any person who violates any provision of this subsection shall be guilty of a Class E crime" (units/ME.md D2); and Kansas, added at wake 37, whose K.S.A. 44-718(b) provides that a violator "shall, for each such offense, be fined not less than $50 nor more than $500, or imprisoned for not more than six months, or both" (units/KS.md D2). Oklahoma, added at wake 39, makes a fourth, and its penalty sentence is word-for-word the Kansas one — 40 O.S. § 2-302(A) (units/OK.md D2); the two provisions share a drafting ancestor and differ only in that Oklahoma's cap is published and Kansas's is not (note 35). Kentucky and Kansas are opposite cases: Kentucky criminalises exceeding a published percentage, while Kansas criminalises exceeding an amount it does not publish anywhere — see note 93. Oklahoma sits on Kentucky's side of that line. units/KY.md D2.

76. Kentucky is the only covered state whose rules say how a second-level decision becomes binding precedent, and require the precedents to be published. 787 KAR 1:110 Section 3(4)(a)3 lets the commission designate a decision a precedent on four enumerated grounds — first impression, clarifying statutory language, reversing an earlier precedent, adopting a court decision — and makes it "binding on all lower levels of determination"; Section 3(6) requires the commission to "develop, distribute, and maintain a manual or digest containing all precedent decisions currently valid" and to supply individual decisions free of charge on request. California is the only other covered state whose unit quotes law showing a precedent-decision mechanism exists at all, and it shows it sideways — through a statute extending the judicial-review clock to the date a decision "is designated as a precedent decision" (Cal. Unemp. Ins. Code § 410) — without saying who designates one or what it binds. Connecticut's unit names one without quoting it: its list of statutes cited describes §§ 31-249 to 31-249h as covering, among other things, precedent, and it reports that the Board's rule counts precedential value among the grounds for ordering a further hearing (Regs. § 31-237g-40(a)). Neither says who designates a precedent or what it binds. The units for the other thirty-eight say nothing on the subject. (Recounted at wake 66 against forty-one: this sentence had said the other twenty-two, and had missed Connecticut.) units/KY.md F1, units/CT.md F1.

77. Kentucky is the only covered state whose statute lets one claimant take a court appeal on behalf of everyone in the same position. Where a claimant was denied under the labor-dispute provision, KRS 341.460(2) allows an appeal "for himself and for and on behalf of all other claimants similarly situated within that establishment or other establishments whose claims were denied by reason of the same alleged labor dispute or strike," and lets an appealing employer join all the workers in its establishment. Those appeals, and employer liability appeals, go to the Franklin Circuit Court rather than to the claimant's county — a single named court for two categories of case. Maryland's nearest analogue is administrative rather than judicial: a representative may file one appeal for several claimants on a shared issue (COMAR 09.32.11.01A(2)). North Carolina's Board "may provide for group hearings" at its own discretion, which is not a party's right. Illinois runs the other way outright — "[t]he appeal must be limited to one claimant." units/KY.md F3.

78. Kentucky's hearing-format rule is the only one in this table that makes a remote hearing compulsory at a stated distance. 787 KAR 1:110 Section 2(4)(d) requires teleconference if an in-person hearing would "[r]equire any party to travel more than fifty (50) miles" — or create undue expense, personal risk, or a security risk. Pennsylvania uses the same fifty miles but the other way round: it is one of several grounds on which the tribunal may hold a remote hearing, alongside consent, health and safety, staffing and disaster declarations, and § 505 of its UC Law separately guarantees either party telephone testimony "without regard to distance" (units/PA.md C1). New Jersey's fifty-mile figure appears only on an agency web page, not in any rule (units/NJ.md C1). Wisconsin has a travel-burden test with no number, Connecticut and Colorado qualitative ones. Kentucky states a number and removes the discretion. units/KY.md C1.

79. A Kentucky regulation explains its own existence by citing a provision one subparagraph short of the one that matters. 787 KAR 1:110 opens by telling the reader that "KRS 13B.020(3)(e)1 exempts unemployment insurance hearings from the provisions of KRS Chapter 13B" — the chapter that would otherwise govern administrative hearings statewide. The exemption is real, but (3)(e)1 is the Kentucky Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission and its occupational safety and health hearings; unemployment insurance hearings are (3)(e)2, the item after it. The version of KRS 13B.020 read for this reference was last amended effective 9 April 2026, well after the regulation's February 2022 amendment. This belongs with South Carolina's two dangling cross-references (units/SC.md) and Maryland's stale subsection numbers: a citation that once pointed somewhere and no longer does. Reported as printed. units/KY.md.

80. Iowa splits its appeal chain across two outside bodies, and no other covered state has that exact shape. The administrative law judge who hears the first appeal is employed by the division of administrative hearings (Iowa Code § 10A.801) and the Employment Appeal Board that hears the second was created in the same third department, Inspections, Appeals, and Licensing (§ 10A.601); neither belongs to Iowa Workforce Development, which decided the claim. An outside first-level body is not rare — California's judges belong to the appeals board, Michigan's come from a hearings office in another department, Washington's are statutorily not agency employees, and Ohio's hearing officers belong to the Review Commission. What is unmatched is the split: California and Ohio each route both levels to a single outside body, while Iowa uses two different ones. A third and weaker pattern should not be confused with either — Massachusetts, South Carolina and Florida each wall their second-level body off from the agency's divisions while leaving it inside the same department. Checked against all twenty-four other units at wake 32. units/IA.md A2, A3.

81. The same fact — distance — protects the claimant's choice of hearing format in Iowa and removes it in Kentucky. Iowa Code § 96.6(3)(a) says the parties "shall be afforded the opportunity to choose either a telephone hearing or an in-person hearing," and a request for an in-person hearing "shall be approved unless the in-person hearing would be impractical because of the distance between the parties to the hearing" — distance is the one ground on which the agency may refuse. Kentucky's rule uses distance the other way: past fifty miles a teleconference is compelled (note 78). Pennsylvania's fifty-mile rule sits between them, letting the tribunal authorise a remote hearing on its own initiative. A right to an in-person hearing on request is not itself unusual, and Iowa's is not the strongest: Missouri's rule grants "an absolute right to an in-person hearing" with no exception at all, North Carolina's requires no showing, and Ohio's is an election a party makes within ten days. Iowa's distinctive feature is the pairing — a two-way choice offered up front, with a single narrow ground for refusing it. Iowa's rule then states broader grounds than its own statute, adding the number of parties and the health of any party to the statutory test of distance (871 IAC 26.5(3)). Checked against all twenty-four other units at wake 32. units/IA.md C1.

82. Iowa's clocks are described in one set of words by the statute and another by the rule, twice over, and nothing says the two are the same date. At the first level the statute runs ten calendar days from when notification "was issued" (Iowa Code § 96.6(2)) while the department's rule runs them "from the date noted on the initial determination" (871 IAC 26.3(1)). At the second level the statute says fifteen days from "the date of notification or mailing of the decision" (§ 96.6(3)(a)) while the Board's own rule says "from the date of the decision" (486 IAC 3.1(2)). In ordinary practice a decision is dated and sent the same day, but neither pair of texts says so, and the difference is the kind that decides a one-day-late appeal. This belongs with Connecticut, where a statute and an unmaintained rule start the same clock from different events (note 53), and with Maryland's two enacted versions of one chain (note 48). units/IA.md B1, F1.

83. Iowa lets a party skip the second level entirely — and two other covered states do too, by different routes. Iowa Code § 96.6(3)(b) says an administrative law judge's decision "may be appealed by any party to the employment appeal board created in section 10A.601 or directly to the district court." Michigan allows the same bypass but only on the written stipulation of both claimant and employer (MCL 421.38(2)), so one party cannot elect it alone; Ohio reaches the same place indirectly, because an unappealed hearing officer's decision becomes final as a decision of the Commission and is reviewable without the review level ever being used. Iowa's is the one stated as a unilateral choice on the face of the statute. The reading is not clean, and the page says so: § 17A.19(1) grants judicial review only to a party who "has exhausted all adequate administrative remedies," and the Board's rules describe court review as following a Board decision. Nothing in either text reconciles them, and this reference does not either. Checked against all twenty-four other units at wake 32. units/IA.md F1, F3.

84. Iowa's rule chapters carry a date on which they are scheduled to be rescinded, and no other covered state's does. Each chapter read for this state prints a line such as "Chapter rescission date pursuant to Iowa Code section 17A.7: 4/8/31" — 871 IAC ch. 26 expires 8 April 2031, 486 IAC ch. 3 on 1 January 2028, 871 IAC ch. 25 on 18 December 2029 — under a rules-review statute that sunsets a chapter unless it is affirmatively renewed. It is not a repeal and must not be read as one; every chapter cited here is in force. Two things that look similar are not: Virginia has a single substantive provision with a legislative sunset in 2028, which is one provision rather than a whole rulebook, and Connecticut has a regulation that simply stopped being maintained after 1997 (note 53) — an expiry that happened rather than one that was scheduled. Checked against all twenty-four other units at wake 32. units/IA.md Sources.

85. Iowa enumerates its holidays by date; so does Wisconsin, and the rest of the table does not. Iowa Code § 4.1(34) extends a deadline falling on a Saturday, a Sunday, a day the clerk's office is closed, or any of a list of holidays named individually — 1 January, the third Monday in January, 12 February, the third Monday in February, the last Monday in May, 4 July, the first Monday in September, 11 November, the fourth Thursday in November, 25 December — to the next day "the office of the board, commission, or official is open," which by its own terms reaches the filing of an appeal from a board or official rather than only acts done in a court. That last point is what Oregon's general statute lacks (note 57). Iowa's list is not the most detailed in the table: Wisconsin's rule incorporates two statutory lists that between them add 24 and 31 December and both election days (note 45's chapter). Most covered states say "Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday" and stop. Checked against all twenty-four other units at wake 32. units/IA.md B2.

86. West Virginia has the shortest unconditional first-level deadline in the table, and its weekend rule lives in the rule rather than the statute. Eight calendar days from when notice of the deputy's decision "has been delivered or mailed" (W. Va. Code § 21A-7-8) — two days under the 10-day tie held by Massachusetts, South Carolina and Iowa (note 28), and binding claimant and employer alike. Only two shorter numbers appear anywhere in the table and neither is an unconditional claimant deadline: New Jersey's 7 days is the employer's alone (note 18) and Arizona's 7 applies only where the determination was handed over in person (note 32). The extension for a deadline landing on a weekend comes from 84 CSR 1 § 3.4, not from the code — it is written as postmark acceptance rather than as a calendar rule ("The postmark date is the filing date. If the last filing day for an appeal falls on a weekend, or a state or federal holiday, postmarking's for the next business day will be accepted"), and it reaches weekends and state or federal holidays only. That is a fifth mechanism to add to the four in the opening paragraph. The code supplies its own answer separately, and a broader one: § 2-2-1(d) extends a period fixed by "any legislative rule or other administrative rule" past a Saturday, Sunday, legal holiday or designated day off. units/WV.md B1, B2.

87. West Virginia's late-appeal excuse exists only in the rule, and the statute it sits under says the opposite. 84 CSR 1 § 3.4 lets the Board "for good cause shown" accept a late appeal and makes a refusal itself appealable to the Board — a second look several covered states do not give. But § 21A-7-8 states that the deputy's decision "shall be final ... unless an appeal is filed within such time," with no exception of any kind, and the rule never defines good cause. Virginia has the mirror-image gap — good cause granted by statute and defined nowhere (units/VA.md B4) — and North Carolina names an excuse in its rules that is defined nowhere (note 22's state). West Virginia is the case where the excuse itself, not merely its standard, has no statutory counterpart. units/WV.md B4.

88. West Virginia has the shortest second-level window in the table, and it is the same number as its first. Eight calendar days to the Board of Review (W. Va. Code § 21A-7-9), against the 10 days that previously tied North Carolina and South Carolina for shortest. It is also one of the few states where both administrative deadlines are identical — no lengthening as the case climbs, and no shortening either. Nevada is the nearest comparison for oddness of number (11 days, note 44's state); West Virginia's is odd for being short at both levels at once. Reconsideration is not merely optional but foreclosed: 84 CSR 1 § 5.8 says requests for reconsideration "will not be considered except those involving administrative or clerical error," which answers the exhaustion question (§ 21A-7-19) by removing the step rather than by excusing it. units/WV.md F1, F2.

89. West Virginia's judicial-review deadline forks inside a single sentence, and the sections that carry out that appeal name a court the statute no longer sends it to. § 21A-7-17 gives 30 days to the Intermediate Court of Appeals, then adds a proviso cutting it to 20 "in cases relating to a disqualification under §21A-6-3(4)" — the labor-dispute and strike disqualification. Two deadlines, one sentence, and the agency's own appeals page states only the 30. New York is the other covered state whose deadlines behave counterintuitively at this level (30 then 20, note 8's state), but New York's inversion is between levels; West Virginia's is between kinds of case at the same level. Separately, the chain is unconformed. A 2024 amendment (HB 5395) moved the destination from a circuit court to the Intermediate Court of Appeals and repealed § 21A-7-20 outright, but §§ 21A-7-23 through 21A-7-29 — trial in the circuit court of Kanawha County, appeal bond, service of process, certification of the record, "Appeal to Supreme Court of Appeals," supersedeas — show no amendment after 1991, and § 21A-7-30, the employer's chargeability appeal, still routes itself "to the circuit court of Kanawha county and thence to the Supreme Court of Appeals" on text last touched in 1953. Virginia's three live vintages of one body's name (units/VA.md) are the closest parallel; this is the same failure applied to a court rather than to a name. units/WV.md F3, G.

90. Maine's rule tells the claimant the deadline, and tells them the wrong one — the number the statute stopped using in 2023. 26 M.R.S. § 1194(2) now gives 30 calendar days from mailing to appeal a deputy's determination, and up to 30 more for good cause. 12-172 C.M.R. ch. 11 § 3 requires the Deputy's Decision itself to carry "a notice to the claimant and the employer that the decision may be appealed ... within fifteen (15) days after the decision was mailed," with "an additional fifteen (15) days for good cause shown." The direction of the discrepancy is provable rather than inferred, because Maine's enacted session law prints amendments with the old words struck and the new inserted: PL 2023, c. 53, § 3 reads "within 15 30 calendar days" and "an additional 15 30 calendar days," and the volume's title page gives 25 October 2023 as that session's general effective date. The rule's own history ends at a substantive amendment on 27 March 2004, with a non-substantive header edit in 2024. Thirty days governs — a rule cannot shorten a statutory period — but the rule governs the notice, and the notice is what a claimant reads. Connecticut is the nearest parallel and the shapes differ instructively: there the unconformed rule changed the trigger event while keeping the number (note 53); here the number itself is halved, and it is halved in the document the agency is required to hand the claimant. Maine's own website carries the correct 30. units/ME.md B1. (Amended wake 64. Delaware is the second covered state whose first-level deadline changed after the DOL comparison's most recent edition — 84 Del. Laws, c. 150, effective 1 October 2023, three weeks before this act — and the two together say something neither says alone: 2023 produced at least two lengthenings that no secondary source has picked up. Delaware's rules never stated a deadline, so nothing there went stale; the defect note 90 records is Maine's alone. Note 149.)

91. Maine's weekend rule is the only one in this table that grants the extension to one filing method and withholds it from another in the same sentence. (This note said "the only one in this table that depends on how the appeal is sent" until wake 68. Idaho, added at wake 60, falsifies the broader form: Idaho Code § 72-1368(3)(c) attaches a weekend-and-holiday rollover to the electronic channel alone — "A faxed or electronically transmitted appeal shall be deemed filed on the date received by the department, mountain time, or, if received on a weekend or holiday, the next business day" — while the personal-delivery and mail branches of the same subsection carry no such clause. Idaho's method-dependence is an omission spread across three parallel branches; Maine's is one sentence that gives the extension to hand delivery and takes it away from mail.) 12-172 C.M.R. ch. 5 § 5 extends a period ending on "a Saturday, Sunday or holiday" to the next day that is none of those "if the appeal is filed by delivery and is received in-hand by the agency" — but for a mailed appeal "the appeal period will not be extended, and the appeal must be postmarked within the statutory appeal period, unless the appeal period falls on a Sunday or a holiday." So a Saturday deadline moves for the claimant who walks the appeal in and not for the one who mails it. Maryland is the other covered state whose extension reaches a Sunday and a holiday but not a Saturday (note 52); the difference is that Maryland's gap applies to every filer, and Maine's applies to some filers and not others under the same sentence. Nothing softens it: 1 M.R.S. ch. 3 was read in full and contains no general computation-of-time rule for administrative deadlines, and the one general provision Maine has, § 71(12), routes only judicial-proceeding periods to Rule 6(a) of the Maine Rules of Civil Procedure — the same confined shape that left Oregon with no extension at all (note 57). A further consequence the rule does not address: § 5 splits filings into "by delivery" and "by mailing," while the agency accepts appeals by e-mail and through an online portal, which are neither. units/ME.md B2, B3.

92. Maine conditions the right of second-level appeal on having turned up at the first hearing. 26 M.R.S. § 1194(3) gives 15 calendar days from mailing to appeal to the Unemployment Insurance Commission "as long as the appealing party appeared at the hearing and was given notice of the effect of the failure to appear in writing prior to the hearing," and 12-172 C.M.R. ch. 5 § 4(B) closes the reconsideration route to a non-appearing party as well, absent good cause. New York has the only comparable condition in this table and it is narrower: NY Labor Law § 621(1) attaches "provided he appeared at the hearing" to the employer alone (units/NY.md F1), where Maine's reaches claimant, employer and deputy alike (rule § 1(D)(3)). Maine pairs it with a way back — a default "may be set aside ... for good cause shown," on written request, with a good-cause hearing before the underlying merits are reached (rule § 1(B)(1) and (1)(a)). Neither of the agency's two appeals pages mentions the condition, and the two pages state the 15-day deadline from different events: the appeals page from the mailing date, matching the statute, and the FAQ from "the date of the Hearing Officer's decision," which is not what the statute says. units/ME.md F1.

93. Maine is the second checked instance of the category note 35 hedges, after Nevada — and unlike Nevada the look produced something. 26 M.R.S. § 1044(2) ends "no such counsel or agents shall either charge or receive for such services more than an amount approved by the commission," the shape that left California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Michigan in note 35's unverified column. Going to look found 12-172 C.M.R. ch. 5 § 1(L): an itemized fee statement submitted in duplicate for approval, six named factors including "the amount of fees requested in light of the final amount of benefits awarded to the claimant," and a categorical refusal for an appeal "made in bad faith or frivolously." There is no cap figure. So the tally now runs: Oregon, Kentucky and — added at wake 39 — Oklahoma are the three states where looking produced a number (notes 58, 75, 35), Nevada, — added at wake 37 — Kansas, and — added at wake 45 — Louisiana are where looking produced a confirmed blank (notes 65, 110), and Maine is where it produced a documented process. (This sentence counted two states until Oklahoma was added.) (Kansas amendment.) K.S.A. 44-718(b) is the same shape — "no such counsel or agents shall either charge or receive for such services more than an amount approved by the secretary of labor" — and the look was made through the Board of Review's entire rule corpus, agency 48, and through the Division of Employment's agency 50. Neither contains a figure, a percentage, a formula, or even a procedure for seeking approval; the only rule on the subject, K.A.R. 48-3-2(e), points straight back at the statute ("No fees shall be charged or received … until the fees have been approved in accordance with K.S.A. 44-718(b)"). Statute and rule cite each other and neither states the number. Kansas is therefore a harder case than Nevada: both criminalise exceeding an unpublished cap, but Nevada's blank is a missing figure, while Kansas's is a closed loop — a representative who wanted to comply could read every word of both sources and still not know what to charge, or whom to ask. units/KS.md D2. Maine also carries a public-funds fee shift: § 1044(2) directs that where a claimant's court appeal reverses the commission "in whole or in part," the fees "must be paid by the commissioner from the commissioner's administrative fund" — a fee shift on success, and a separate object from the approval of a claimant-paid fee in the ordinary case. units/ME.md D2. (Amended when Rhode Island was added: this sentence said the provision was one no other unit in this reference recorded, and Rhode Island falsifies that — see note 121, which also sets out how the two differ.)

94. Kansas runs the entire chain on one number, and it is a number no other covered state uses. Sixteen calendar days from the examiner's determination to the referee (K.S.A. 44-709(b)(3)), sixteen from the referee's decision to the board of review (subsection (c)), and sixteen from the board's decision to a court (subsection (i)). Seven other covered states also run one figure the whole way — Texas 14, Michigan 30, Washington 30, Virginia 30, Louisiana 15, Nevada 11, Minnesota 45 — and Pennsylvania and West Virginia match only at the first two. (Until wake 67 this note said Minnesota was the only other one. It was wrong when written at wake 37: six of those seven were already published, and note 62 had already said Nevada "runs its whole chain on one number." The uniform-number shape is ordinary; what is unique to Kansas is the number itself — sixteen appears nowhere else in this table.) What makes the Kansas version worth its own note is that the uniformity is misleading: the first two are appeals within the agency and carry the weekend extension in K.S.A. 44-709(e); the third is a petition to a court, and subsection (e)'s own scope sentence reaches only "appeals under this section from the examiner's or the special examiner's determination or from the referee's decision" — which does not name it. Whether K.S.A. 60-206(a), the general computation statute reaching "any statute or administrative rule or regulation that does not specify a method of computing time," fills that gap is genuinely open, and units/KS.md says so rather than resolving it. So three identical deadlines may not extend identically, and the one that may not extend is the one that ends the case. units/KS.md B1, B2, F3.

95. Kansas is the second covered state whose judicial-review deadline is shorter than its own administrative-review act's default — and the only one where the trigger changes too. K.S.A. 77-613(b), the Kansas Judicial Review Act's general filing provision, gives 30 days after service of the order, opening "Subject to other requirements of this act or of another statute." K.S.A. 44-709(i) is that other statute, and it gives 16 calendar days after the date of the mailing of the decision. A claimant told — correctly — that their appeal goes to a court "in accordance with the Kansas judicial review act," who then opens that act at the section headed Time for filing petition, finds a number nearly twice the one that binds them, counted from a later event. Oregon is the other instance and it is the benign version (note 57): ORS 183.482(1) sets 60 days "unless otherwise provided by statute" and § 657.282 provides 30, so the special statute is shorter but both run from the same event. Kansas shortens the period and moves the start earlier, and mailing always precedes service. units/KS.md F3.

96. Kansas's appeal rules were frozen in January 2010 against a statute amended seven times since, and the drift is not theoretical — it has changed two answers a claimant would rely on. Every regulation in K.A.R. agency 48 — the Employment Security Board of Review's own rules, all four articles, the whole of the state's appeal procedure — carries the same last-amended date, 22 January 2010, and cites "K.S.A. 2008 Supp. 44-709" as its authority. K.S.A. 44-709's History line records amendments in 2010, twice in 2013, and in 2015, 2020 (Special Session), 2021 and 2024. Two consequences are visible in the text. On late appeals, the statute permits waiver or extension only "if a timely response was impossible due to excusable neglect" (44-709(b)(3), (c)) while K.A.R. 48-4-2 asks only whether the party "failed to file a timely appeal because of excusable neglect" — impossibility appears in one and not the other, on the single question that decides whether a late claimant is heard at all. On hearing format, K.A.R. 48-1-4(e)(1)(C) promises that where all parties request an in-person hearing before the scheduled telephone hearing "the matter shall be continued and set for an in-person hearing," while K.S.A. 44-709(k) now lets the referee "deny the request in the absence of good cause shown." Connecticut is the nearest comparison (note 53) and Kansas is the larger case: Connecticut's rules stopped in 1997 against two later statutory amendments, Kansas's stopped in 2010 against seven, and in Kansas it is the entire appeals corpus rather than a subset. units/KS.md B4, C1, and its own "Four places where two texts do not line up."

97. Kansas forbids its second-level body to reconsider its own decision — and the prohibition is the first sentence of the subsection that also sets the court deadline. "Any action of the employment security board of review including that of a board panel, may not be reconsidered after the mailing of the decision" (K.S.A. 44-709(i)). Read against the Kansas Administrative Procedure Act this is a deliberate reversal: K.S.A. 77-529(a)(1) lets any party petition for reconsideration within 15 days and says the filing "is not a prerequisite" for review, and K.S.A. 77-612(c) says a petitioner "need not seek reconsideration unless a statute makes" it a prerequisite. Both texts assume reconsideration exists and ask only whether it is required; 44-709(i) removes it. West Virginia is the other covered state where second-level reconsideration is foreclosed rather than merely optional (note 88). The practical effect in Kansas is that the 16-day clock in the same subsection is the only thing left: there is no motion that can pause it and no second look inside the agency. units/KS.md F2.

98. Kansas is the fourth covered state whose agency is unreachable, and the first where the claimant-facing site is the one that disappeared. (Kansas was not the first covered state whose law answers E1 in neither direction — Pennsylvania was, and note 144 carries the correction made at wake 68. Vermont is a third — note 144 — and Vermont's silence is not caused by an unreachable agency, since its statute and rules are both complete and both simply do not address it.) Massachusetts, Arizona and Minnesota are the others (see Coverage). Kansas fails twice over and in two different ways: dol.ks.gov returns HTTP 403 to every path tried under two browser user-agent shapes, and getkansasbenefits.gov — the address Kansas unemployment paperwork has carried for years — now redirects to kansasui.gov, which serves a 42 KB shell whose entire readable content asks the visitor to enable JavaScript. This costs units/KS.md a check the other units get to run: in Maryland, South Carolina, Kentucky and Iowa, reading the agency's own pages against its own rules is what found the error (notes 46, 69, 74, 83). In Kansas that comparison cannot be made at all. It also leaves E1 — benefits pending appeal — recorded as NOT FOUND IN PRIMARY SOURCE in both directions, which is a genuine null: nine statutory sections and both rule agencies were searched and none addresses payment while an appeal is pending. In most covered states that answer comes from the agency's own pages, and here there are none to read. units/KS.md E1 and Sources.

99. Utah is the fourth covered state whose implementing rule states the first-level deadline differently from its own statute — and the first where the rule changes the length as well as the trigger, in the filing rule itself, with both texts demonstrably current. Utah Code § 35A-4-406(3)(a) gives a claimant "within 10 days after the date of mailing of the notice of determination or redetermination to the party's last-known address." Utah Admin. Code R994-508-102(1) says "[t]he time permitted for an appeal is 15 calendar days from the date on the Department decision unless otherwise specified on the decision," and the Department's own filing page says 15. The three earlier instances each differ from this one in a way worth keeping straight. Connecticut (note 53) changed the trigger and kept the number, and the divergence is provably an unconformed rule: the statute was amended in 2016 and the regulation was last touched in 1997. Iowa (note 81) likewise changed only the trigger — statute "issued," rule "the date noted on the initial determination" — same ten days. Maine (note 90) is the one that halves a number, and its shape is the closest to Utah's, but the stale text there is a notice-content rule prescribing what the Deputy's Decision must tell its reader, and its staleness is provable from the session law. Utah's is the rule that actually governs filing, and neither text is a leftover: R994-508 took effect 22 April 2020 and was re-adopted unchanged by a five-year review effective 22 March 2023 (Office of Administrative Rules, Index of Changes, filing 52589), while § 35A-4-406 carries a 2025 General Session amendment and still reads 10. So this is not one instrument lagging the other; it is two current instruments disagreeing, and the agency publishing the one that is not the statute. A fourth wrinkle has no parallel anywhere in this table: the rule does not fix even its own number, because "unless otherwise specified on the decision" hands the operative deadline to whatever the individual notice says. The direction of the discrepancy also runs opposite to Maine's — in Maine the claimant is told less time than the law allows, in Utah more. units/UT.md B1.

100. Utah's judicial-review chapter forbids a stay and its own general chapter grants one, to the same court, over the same order. Utah Code § 35A-4-508(8)(g) ends with "[i]n no event may a petition for judicial review act as a supersedeas." The word appears in ten of the thirty units here, so a bar of this kind is not itself unusual — Oklahoma's reaches further, barring any "injunction, supersedeas, stay or other writ." What has no parallel found here is the pairing: Utah Code § 35A-1-302(3), in the chapter that governs the department's adjudicative proceedings generally, tells the reviewing court it has jurisdiction "to suspend or delay the operation or execution of the order of the Workforce Appeals Board being appealed," and § 63G-4-405 supplies the same power again at the level of all Utah agency adjudication. Section 35A-4-508(9) declares its own procedure "the sole and exclusive procedure notwithstanding any other provision of this title" — which reaches § 35A-1-302 but says nothing about Title 63G. No source read for units/UT.md resolves which controls, and the unit publishes the tension rather than picking. The same section pins review narrowly in a way that is common in this table: facts "if supported by evidence, are conclusive and the jurisdiction of the court is confined to questions of law."

101. Utah is the first covered state whose fee rule says out loud what it does not regulate. Every state in this table that regulates representative fees does so by stating a cap, an approval requirement, or a bar (note 35 sets out the six mechanisms found so far). Utah states a seventh thing alongside them — the boundary. R994-508-201(1) requires prior ALJ or Board approval before a non-attorney representative may charge a claimant anything, adds that "[t]he Department is not responsible for the payment of the fee, only the regulation and approval of the fee," and then closes: "The Department does not regulate fees charged to employers or attorney's fees." The approved fee is capped at "25 percent of the claimant's maximum potential regular benefit entitlement" (R994-508-201(2)), which is the same percentage and roughly the same base as several states in note 35. What is new is the express disclaimer: elsewhere in this table an unregulated class is an inference from silence, and a wake reading those states has to say "not found in primary source." Here the rule says it. The disclaimer also sits oddly against the criteria rule two sections later, which tells the ALJ to gauge "[t]he prevailing fee in the community" using information "obtained from the Utah State Bar Association, Lawyer's Referral Service, or other similar organizations" (R994-508-203(4)) — attorney rates are the benchmark for a fee regime that excludes attorneys. Utah's statutory delegation is drawn just as narrowly: § 35A-4-103(3)(b) reaches only "[a]n authorized agent, who is not an attorney." units/UT.md D2.

102. Alabama and Arizona write the same first-level deadline in almost the same sentence, and they are the only two covered states where the length of the deadline depends on how the notice was served. (New Jersey also has two numbers, but they are split by party — employer against claimant — not by service method; Ohio has two triggers but one number.) Alabama: "within seven calendar days after delivery of such notice or within 15 calendar days after such notice was mailed to his last known address" (§ 25-4-91(d)(1)). Arizona: "within seven calendar days after the delivery of notification, or within fifteen calendar days after notification was mailed" (A.R.S. § 23-773(B), units/AZ.md B1). Same numbers, same pairing of delivery against mailing, same calendar-day basis — two 1930s unemployment acts drafted from the same federal model and never diverging on this point. Everywhere else in this table a state picks one trigger; these two decline to. The practical consequence is the same in both: a claimant who was handed the notice has less than half the time of one who was mailed it, and nothing on the face of the deadline tells them which case they are in. Alabama's rule adds the word Arizona's statute does not have — "personal delivery" (Ala. Admin. Code r. 480-4-3-.17(3)(a)) — which narrows the short branch slightly, in the claimant's favour, by rule rather than by statute.

103. Alabama is the second covered state whose agency states a weekend rule broader than the one its law contains. South Carolina was the first (note 69): the appeals statute says "ten days," no weekend rule exists anywhere in the law, and the agency's page tells claimants "By law" the deadline moves to the next business day. Alabama's version is subtler and therefore worse to check. A weekend rule does exist — § 1-1-4, the general computation-of-time statute — but it names Sunday and legal holidays and stops. Saturday reaches it only through a third branch about offices closing "as permitted by any law of this state," and no source read for units/AL.md establishes that the Hearings and Appeals Division closes on Saturdays under any such law. The department's benefit-rights booklet nonetheless tells claimants that if the last day "falls on a weekend or a state holiday, the deadline to file an appeal will be the next business day." So the agency is not inventing a rule out of nothing, as South Carolina's arguably is; it is stating the broad version of a narrow one. Separately, Alabama joins the group of covered states with no late-appeal excuse of any kind — (This note named Illinois, South Carolina, Kentucky and Iowa as the others, and put Texas and Minnesota in a separate class as states that "refuse one expressly," until wake 68. A sweep of all forty-one B4 fields corrected both halves. The group is eleven: Alabama, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, South Carolina and Vermont — five of them published after this note was written. And Minnesota does not belong beside Texas. Texas has the express sentence — "There is no good cause exception to the timeliness rules" (40 Tex. Admin. Code § 815.32(i)(8)) — while MN.md B4 records only a mandatory-dismissal statute with "No good-cause exception is stated" and a NOT FOUND IN PRIMARY SOURCE, which is the same recorded absence as the other ten. Texas is the only covered state that refuses one expressly.) Alabama's absence has a particular texture: chapter 25-4 and its rules use "good cause" freely elsewhere — for late weekly certifications, and for postponing a scheduled hearing (Ala. Admin. Code r. 480-1-4-.10(1)) — so the phrase is plainly in the drafter's vocabulary and is simply not attached to the appeal deadline. units/AL.md B2, B4.

104. Alabama's second level is the only one in this table that a claimant can be let past by the body's own inaction — and the statute and the rule disagree about when that happens. The Board of Appeals is reached by an application for leave to appeal, filed within 15 days (§ 25-4-92(c)); the Board "may permit any party in interest to initate an appeal to it" (§ 25-4-94(a), spelling as printed), and its own FAQ says the members "do not have to state a reason for denying an appeal." Several covered states have a discretionary second level. What Alabama adds is § 25-4-94(b): "Unless the application for appeal ... is granted by the board of appeals within 10 days after its filing with it, the applicant may, within the following 10 days, take an appeal from the decision of the appeals tribunal to the circuit court." Silence opens the courthouse. But Ala. Admin. Code r. 480-1-3-.03(1) gives the Board "[w]ithin 30 days after the application ... shall have been received" to grant or deny — so on the two texts an applicant's ten-day court window opens on day eleven and shuts on day twenty while the Board still has ten days of its own left to run. This is note 99's Utah problem (rule and statute stating the same deadline differently) with a worse consequence, because here the mismatch is not about how long the claimant has but about whether the claimant's route to court is open at all. And it cannot be resolved the way Utah's was: LII prints amendment dates for some Alabama rules and none for 480-1-3-.03, and the state's own rules site is unfetchable, so neither instrument can be dated against the other. units/AL.md F1.

105. Indiana's appeal deadline is fifteen days in every instruction the department gives and eighteen in one reading of the statute, and the department never mentions the difference. IC 22-4-17-2 starts the clock when the determination "was sent" and makes the printed date self-proving. Eleven sections later, IC 22-4-17-14 says "[t]his section applies to notices given under sections 2, 3, 11, and 12 of this chapter" — every appeal deadline in the chapter — and then: "If a notice is served through the United States mail, three (3) days must be added to a period that commences upon service of that notice." 646 IAC 5-10-19(c) repeats that sentence word for word. The department's "File an Appeal" page and its claimant handbook each state fifteen days from the sent date and neither mentions the three. The one crack is that section 2 says "sent" where section 14 says "service," and nothing read for units/IN.md equates the two, which is why the unit prints both texts rather than telling anyone to count eighteen. Two other covered states add three days for mail, and both comparisons are instructive. (This corrects the claim that stood here until wake 67 — that North Carolina was the only other one. Minnesota was added at wake 19 and this note was written at wake 43, so the claim was wrong when it was made, not overtaken later.) N.C. Gen. Stat. § 96-15(c2) writes it into the same section as the deadline it modifies and confines it to the second-level appeal, and units/NC.md states it in its opening paragraph. Minnesota writes it into the judicial-review subdivision and nowhere else — "Three days are added to the 45-calendar-day period if the decision on reconsideration was mailed to the parties," Minn. Stat. § 268.105, subd. 7(a) — and units/MN.md carries it as an open question precisely because it is confined to that one subdivision. Indiana's reaches four separate deadline provisions from outside all of them, and appears in no document a claimant is handed. units/IN.md B1.

106. Two covered states define "contrary to equity and good conscience" by a poverty number instead of by discretion, and the two numbers are more than twice apart. Michigan's waiver reaches a household at or below 150 % of the federal poverty guidelines, capped at three additional hardship applications a year (MCL 421.62(a)(ii), units/MI.md E2). Indiana's reaches one at or below 65 %: IC 22-4-13-1(j) says repayment "is contrary to equity and good conscience under subsection (i) when the individual's combined household gross income is sixty-five percent (65%) or less of the current Federal Poverty Guidelines," measured over the first two of the last three completed calendar quarters, with IC 22-4-13-1(k) defining the household down to a child in joint custody who is in the dwelling half the time. The same statutory phrase, in both states, and a claimant at 100 % of the guidelines is inside Michigan's waiver and outside Indiana's. Indiana also puts a clock on the request that Michigan does not: IC 22-4-13-1(m), effective 1 July 2025, requires the waiver request within fifteen days of the overpayment determination becoming final — the same fifteen days as an appeal. units/IN.md E2.

107. Indiana reaches its court in two filings on two clocks, and the tribunal being appealed from can lengthen the second one. Most covered states have one judicial-review deadline. Indiana has a notice and then an appeal: IC 22-4-17-11(a) gives the parties thirty days from the sending of the review board's decision to file "a notice of intention to appeal," and IC 22-4-17-12(a) then allows the appeal itself "within thirty (30) days after notice of intention to appeal." Filing the notice stays the board's decision for thirty days (§ 11(b)). And IC 22-4-17-12(e) lets the review board — the body whose decision is under appeal — "extend the limit within which the appeal shall be taken, not to exceed fifteen (15) days," on its own motion or on request. No other unit read for this table records a provision letting the administrative body extend a judicial-review deadline. Perfecting the appeal also costs money in a state whose statute otherwise forbids charging a claimant anything: IC 22-4-33-2(a) exempts claimants from fees "[e]xcept for fees charged under IC 22-4-17-12," and section 12 is the transcript the appellant must buy, at a uniform average fee trued up to actual cost — with a poverty affidavit under § 12(d) the one way out. units/IN.md F3, D2.

108. Louisiana is the eighth answer to the weekend-and-holiday question, and the only one where the rule and a statute-code article state opposite results. The rule is explicit that a holiday buys nothing: "Legal holidays and days on which the Louisiana Workforce Commission is closed shall not serve to extend the delay periods specified in R.S. 23:1629 and R.S. 23:1630" (LAC 40:IV-109(C)). The chapter's own computation section looks like it grants an extension and then withdraws it, because it ends "when the time for performing any act is prescribed by statute, nothing in these rules shall be deemed to be a limitation or extension of the statutory time fixed" (§ IV-107(A)) — and these fifteen-day periods are prescribed by statute. Against that, La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 5059 is a computation rule whose opening words reach any "period of time allowed or prescribed by law," not only periods fixed by a court, and its Paragraph D says a legal holiday "shall be excluded in the computation of a period of time allowed or prescribed to seek rehearing, reconsideration, or judicial review or appeal of a decision or order by an agency in the executive branch of state government," excepting only Revenue, Environmental Quality and Insurance. Dating the two is the finding: article 5059 carries "Acts 2018, No. 128, §1; Acts 2019, No. 300, §1; Acts 2025, No. 250, §3" and § IV-109 was last amended in 2013, so the instrument that grants the extension is both later and legislative. Neither text cites the other, and the agency's own claimant page mentions neither. On top of that, whether a Saturday is even a holiday depends on where the claimant lives: R.S. 1:55(A)(1) lists Sundays as legal holidays statewide and makes "the whole of every Saturday" a legal holiday only in Orleans, the city of Baton Rouge, the second and sixth congressional districts except Ascension, and the fourteenth and thirty-first judicial districts. No other unit in this reference records a weekend or holiday rule whose answer changes from one part of the state to another. (Louisiana's deadline cell also points here for a second problem in the same clock: the agency's FAQ says a claimant may appeal "within 15 days of the mailing date of the document" and, two sentences later, that a mailed appeal "must be postmarked no more than 15 days from the date of the determination" — two different start dates in one answer, where R.S. 23:1629(A)(1) and § IV-109(A) both run from when notification was given or mailed. Louisiana joins Maryland, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama and Indiana in the group whose own claimant material does not match its own law on the mechanics of the deadline.)

109. Louisiana conditions second-level review on how the first level came out — and it writes both of the triggers that New Jersey and Maryland split into a single sentence. (This note said Louisiana was the fourth covered state. Wake 51's re-derivation against all thirty-five columns put the family at six — New Jersey, Maryland, Nevada, Louisiana, Utah and Kansas — and found that the rescue described below is not Louisiana's alone either. Both corrections are in the closing section.) "The board of review may otherwise allow an appeal from such decision to be filed … An appeal filed by any such party shall be allowed as of right if such decision was not unanimous, or if the determination was not affirmed by the appeal referee" (R.S. 23:1630(A)). Note 63 records New Jersey's as-of-right trigger for a tribunal that was not unanimous and Maryland's for an examiner who did not affirm; Louisiana carries both. The first of them has the same problem Nevada's would: R.S. 23:1628 appoints "one or more impartial appeal referees" and every rule in the chapter describes a single administrative law judge presiding, so a referee's decision is not the kind of thing that can be non-unanimous, and the practical trigger is the second. What Louisiana adds that none of the other three does is an explicit rescue: on denial of the application, "the decision of the appeal referee shall be deemed to be a decision of the board of review … for purposes of judicial review," with the fifteen days running from the notice of denial (R.S. 23:1630(B)). Nevada's rules require the Board to tell the party about judicial review; Louisiana's statute performs the conversion itself — as does Utah's, § 35A-1-304(1)(c), which wake 51 found carries the same rescue in the same terms.

110. Louisiana is the third checked instance of the category note 35 hedges, and the second state that criminalises exceeding a number it does not publish. R.S. 23:1692 says a claimant "may be represented by counsel or other duly authorized agent; but no such counsel or agents shall either charge or receive for their services more than an amount approved by the administrator" — the shape that left California, New York, Florida, Massachusetts and Michigan unverified. The look was made through all nineteen sections of the appeal rule chapter, the forty-four-section administrative chapter beside it, every statute section in the appeal chain, the agency's claimant appeals FAQ, and the agency's own twenty-six-page printing of its regulations. There is no figure in any of them. That joins Nevada and Kansas in the confirmed-blank column (notes 65, 93). The sting is Nevada's, doubled: the same section makes violation an offence punishable by a fine of "not less than fifty dollars nor more than five hundred dollars, or imprisoned for not less than one month nor more than six months, or both." Nevada's equivalent is a misdemeanour; Louisiana's carries a minimum month of imprisonment for charging more than an amount the state never states. A second unpublished figure sits in the same chain: R.S. 23:1631 provides that subpoenaed witnesses "shall be allowed fees at a rate fixed by the administrator," and the only rule addressing witness expense, § IV-335, covers travelling expenses "in conformity with agency travel regulations" and expressly does not allow "witness fees or mileage to any party interested in the appeal." The rate itself is nowhere.

111. Montana's first-level fork exists only on the agency's website — and the pages that explain it state no deadline at all. Mont. Code Ann. § 39-51-2402(3) has always given an interested party two things to do inside the same ten days: "applies for reconsideration of the determination or appeals." Since 1 July 2025 the department has operated that as an election. Its claimant and employer FAQs both say that "parties will have the option to request either a redetermination by UI Claims Processing staff or may pursue an appeal with OAH," and both answer the follow-up question — "If I appeal, can I still request a redetermination?" — with "No." Nothing in the statute or in Admin. R. Mont. chapter 24.40 says that appealing forfeits the redetermination; § 39-51-2402(2) lets the department reconsider "for good cause" and § 39-51-2406 gives it continuing jurisdiction over claims, neither expressed as lapsing on appeal. And neither FAQ page states the ten-day deadline, or any deadline: the word "days" does not appear on either page. The board's own page, by contrast, states both the ten days and the thirty. This is the South Carolina problem (note 69) with the polarity reversed — there the agency published a rule the law does not contain; here it publishes the election the law does not contain while omitting the number the law does.

112. Montana writes the deadline for appealing to the board into the section before the one that creates the appeal. Mont. Code Ann. § 39-51-2404 is titled "Appeal to board procedure" and states no deadline whatever — it says who may appeal, that the department must transmit the records, that the hearing may be by telephone or videoconference, and when the board's decision becomes final. The ten days live in the last sentence of § 39-51-2403, the section about the referee's decision: "This decision is final unless further review is initiated pursuant to 39-51-2404 within 10 days after the decision was sent." A reader who turns to the appeal-to-the- board section for the time limit will not find one. Compare Maryland (note 52's neighbourhood), where the second-level deadline exists only in the rule and § 8-5A-12 states none — the same defect in a different place. Montana at least keeps it in the statute; it just keeps it one section upstream.

113. Montana answers the question Louisiana leaves open, in almost the same words. Note 110 ended on La. R.S. 23:1631, which allows subpoenaed witnesses fees "at a rate fixed by the administrator" while no Louisiana rule anywhere supplies the rate. Mont. Code Ann. § 39-51-2409 uses the identical formula — witnesses "shall be allowed fees at a rate fixed by the department" — and Montana's rule does what Louisiana's does not: Admin. R. Mont. 24.40.211(1) provides that "fees must be paid as provided in 26-2-501, MCA," which is the general witness-fee schedule for courts, $10 a day plus statutory mileage. So the two states share a statutory delegation and diverge entirely on whether anyone exercised it. Two cautions on the Montana side: the figure is a court schedule rather than an unemployment-specific one, and $10 a day has been the number since 2005.

114. Montana's subpoena rule cites, as its authority, a statute that grants no subpoena power — and the section that does grant it names someone else. Admin. R. Mont. 24.40.211(1) says the appeals referee "may issue subpoenas pursuant to 39-51-2409, MCA." Section 39-51-2409 is the witness-fee section quoted in note 113; it grants nothing, and merely presupposes witnesses "subpoenaed pursuant to 39-51-2406 through 39-51-2410." All five of those sections were read for units/MT.md and none of them grants a subpoena: they are continuing jurisdiction, procedure by regulation, record-keeping, the fee section itself, and judicial review. The chapter's actual grant is § 39-51-301(4)(a) — "The department and the board may jointly or individually issue subpoenas" — which sits in a different part, names the department and the board rather than the referee, and appears nowhere in the rule's own authority note. This is the South Carolina and Kentucky problem (a cross-reference that points at nothing, or one line short) in its most consequential form so far, because what is dangling is a claimant's route to compelling a witness. The practical rule the page reports is unaffected and specific: three subpoenas on request, more only on a four-part written showing.

115. Montana bars paid lay representation at the second level with four exceptions, and leaves the first level unregulated entirely. (This note called Montana "the second covered state to bar paid lay representation outright" until wake 68. Both halves of that were wrong. Montana's bar is not outright — the four exceptions below end in an open-ended one — and it is not second: MO.md D2 says of Missouri in terms that "Missouri is the second covered state to take it: forbid the unregulated class outright," and Maryland is a third, "an agent may not charge or accept compensation for representing a claimant in a proceeding before a hearing examiner" (Md. Code, Lab. & Empl. § 8-507(c)). The unqualified bars are Minnesota, Missouri and Maryland; Montana's is the qualified one. As at note 62, a note contradicted a unit page that had been published for wakes.) Note 35 lists the mechanisms; Minnesota supplied the categorical bar, and Montana supplies a narrower version of it. Admin. R. Mont. 24.7.305(3) lets a party before the board appear personally, by an attorney, or "through an authorized lay representative," then provides that "[l]ay representatives may not be paid for representation unless" one of four things is true: the representative works for the claimant's union, is an employee of the employer, is a third-party administrator drawing regular wages, or — the open end — "it is in the interest of justice at the board's sole discretion." Minnesota's bar has no such escape hatch. Two further differences matter more than the wording. First, ARM 24.7.305 is a rule of the board's chapter, 24.7; nothing in the statute or in chapter 24.40 says whether a party may be represented at all at the appeals-referee hearing, which is where most cases are decided and end. Second, Montana attaches no cap, no percentage, no approval step and no figure to what an attorney may charge at either level, and no statute in the unemployment chapter reaches representative fees. So Montana's answer to the fee question is: unpriced for attorneys, forbidden for most lay representatives at the board, and unaddressed at the first level.

116. Nebraska is the second covered state with no second-level administrative body — and the two disagree about whether the thing that replaces it is compulsory. Minnesota abolished its board and left a request for reconsideration in its place (note 37 and the table's "second level" row); Nebraska never shows a board in the chain at all. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-638(1) lets "[a]ny party to the proceedings before a hearing officer" file a petition in district court, with nothing in between. What Nebraska offers short of court is 224 NAC 1 § 021: ten days from the mailing of the decision to ask the same hearing officer to reconsider, "within the sound discretion of the supervising hearing officer or the hearing officer assigned to the case," with a late request heard only for good cause. The two states then part company on the question that matters to a claimant deciding whether to bother. Minnesota's reconsideration is required: its statute uses the word "exhaust," and its judicial-review subdivision defines what the Court of Appeals reviews as the reconsideration decision (units/MN.md F2). Nebraska's is not required by anything read for units/NE.md — § 48-638(1) attaches no precondition and 224 NAC 1 § 021 imposes none — so the same institutional gap produces an optional step in one state and a trap for the unwary in the other. Nebraska's window is also far shorter: ten days from mailing, against Minnesota's forty-five calendar days from sending.

117. Nebraska is the second covered state where the weekend-and-holiday answer turns on how the appeal was sent, and it gets there by a different route than Maine. This falsifies the sentence in the opening paragraph above, which called Maine the only such state for six wakes; that sentence is now corrected rather than deleted, because the mechanism really is unlike Nebraska's. Maine's single appeals-rule paragraph does the whole job in one place: a deadline moves past a Saturday, Sunday or holiday for an appeal delivered in hand, and past only a Sunday or holiday for one put in the mail (note 91). Nebraska's appeals chapter says nothing about the calendar at all, and the answer has to be assembled from two sources neither of which is about unemployment. The first is a different title of the same department's rules — 218 NAC 1, "Electronic Documents," five paragraphs long — whose § 002 sets midnight Central as the cutoff for any electronically transmitted document and whose § 003 rolls one due on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday to the next business day. The second is Neb. Rev. Stat. § 25-2221, the general computation-of-time statute, which the Nebraska Supreme Court held in Strode v. Saunders Cty. Bd. of Equal., 283 Neb. 802 (2012), applies to administrative rules and regulations and is not limited to proceedings in a court. So the method-dependence in Nebraska is about the hour rather than the day: the appeal rule itself, 224 NAC 1 § 003.B, gives a paper appeal until close of business on the twentieth day and an electronic one until midnight — and only the electronic filer has a rollover written in the department's own rules, the paper filer having to reach the general statute for one — by way of a case that never mentions unemployment. That split, between a rollover written in the department's own rules for one filing method and a rollover that has to be fetched from the general law for the other, is a shape this table has not held before.

118. Nebraska taxes a losing claimant's court costs to the agency. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-638(4) does three things in one subsection: it forbids any bond "as a condition of initiating a proceeding for judicial review or entering an appeal from the decision of the court upon such review"; it forbids any filing fee "by a hearing officer or by the clerk of any court for any service required by sections 48-634 to 48-638"; and, in the sentence between them, it provides that costs "which would be otherwise taxed to a claimant shall be taxed in such courts to the commissioner regardless of the result of the action unless justice and equity otherwise require." Losing does not shift them back. There is a further consequence the statute does not mention and no other provision cross-references: § 84-917(4) of the Administrative Procedure Act makes the agency charge a petitioner for preparing the official record "in all cases except when the petitioner is not required to pay a filing fee" — and § 48-638(4) is exactly such an exception, so the record should come free too. units/NE.md F3 records that last step as an inference, because neither section points at the other. Compare Alabama and Texas, where judicial review is a fresh trial and the cost question is the ordinary one; and note that Nebraska's standard of review, § 84-917(5)(a)'s "de novo on the record of the agency," is a third thing again — not the trial de novo of Ala. Code § 25-4-95, not Texas's hybrid "trial de novo based on the substantial evidence rule," and not deferential record review.

119. Nebraska strips an unresponsive employer of its appeal rights by statute, and it is the only one of eight covered states doing so whose provision has no excuse clause. (This note called Nebraska "the second covered state to strip an unresponsive employer of its appeal rights" until wake 69. A sweep of section G in all forty-one units found eight: Virginia, Massachusetts, Kansas, Utah and Louisiana were published before Nebraska, Rhode Island and Delaware after. Each of the other seven yields to an excuse. Delaware releases the employer "for reasons found to constitute good cause"; Kansas bars the employer "from protesting any subsequent decisions" but lets the limit be waived "if timely response was impossible due to excusable neglect"; and Virginia's waiver of "all rights in connection with the claim" attaches only from the Commission's third such determination, and not where "good cause exists for such failure." The no-excuse half of the note survives.) Utah's version is a rule, and it is qualified: R994-403-121e(2) applies where an employer "fails to provide adequate information in a timely manner without good cause," and the consequence is framed as relinquishment (units/UT.md G). Nebraska's is Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-632(3), and it has no such clause: an employer must supply requested information "within ten days after the mailing or electronic transmission of a request" under § 48-632(1), and if it does not, "the employer shall forfeit any appeal rights otherwise available pursuant to section 48-634." Ten days, mailed trigger, automatic. The claimant-facing half of the same state runs the other way, which is what makes the pair worth recording together: § 48-634(2) and 224 NAC 1 § 003.C both let a late claimant appeal be heard for good cause, and § 48-638(4) shields a claimant from court costs even in defeat. Nebraska is easy on a late claimant and unforgiving of a slow employer, and both halves are in the statute rather than in a rule.

120. Nebraska's witness fee is the small-claims figure, taken from the statute that sets the cap at the district-court figure. This is the note-58/note-75 exercise — following a delegated figure until it resolves — and here it resolves in one hop and then stops. 224 NAC 1 § 009 gives a subpoenaed witness "eight dollars for each day" and "$0.485 per mile." Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-643 caps whatever the commissioner fixes at "the amount allowed for witness fees in district court" and cross-references § 33-139. Section 33-139 sets two numbers in one sentence: witnesses before the district court get twenty dollars a day, and witnesses before the Small Claims Court get eight. The rule's figure is lawful — it is well under the ceiling — but it is the small-claims number, and it sits at 40 per cent of what the cited section allows. The mileage half does not resolve at all: § 33-139 sends mileage to "the rate provided in section 81-1176 for state employees," and § 81-1176(1) sends it on to "the rate established by the Department of Administrative Services," which is an administrative figure that moves. So the rule fixes a number under a ceiling that floats. units/NE.md C4 says the current departmental rate was not established rather than guessing at it.

121. Rhode Island is the second covered state where public money pays a claimant's attorney — and unlike Maine's, it pays before anyone has won. Maine's § 1044(2) (note 93) shifts fees to the commissioner's administrative fund only where a claimant's court appeal reverses the commission, and sets no figure. Rhode Island's R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-44-57(b) operates one level down and on a different trigger: where "either an employer appeals from a determination in favor of the claimant or a claimant successfully appeals a decision unfavorable to the claimant to an appeals body other than a court of law" and the claimant has retained an attorney, that attorney "shall be entitled to a counsel fee of ten percent (10%) of the amount of benefits at issue before the appeals body but not less than two hundred fifty dollars ($250), which shall be paid by the director out of the employment security administrative funds, within thirty (30) days of the date of his or her appearance." So in the employer-appeal branch the entitlement attaches on appearance, not on outcome — the claimant need not win, and need not wait for a court. Rhode Island also keeps Maine's court-level version alongside it, at § 28-44-57(c). Florida's § 443.041(2)(b) is a third variant and belongs with Maine's rather than with this one: court level, claimant must win, amount set by the court under a 50 per cent ceiling. units/RI.md D2.

122. Rhode Island's appeal rules are not in its labour department's title, and the department's own rule is not merely thin on appeals — it is silent. This is the standing fetch the second body's rule lesson in its sharpest form. 260-RICR-40-05-1 is the Department of Labor and Training's regulation, thirty-eight sections, Amendment effective 3 December 2024, and it contains no claimant-appeal procedure at all; its only hearing rule, § 1.16, governs the revocation of an employer's registration under § 28-42-63.1. The whole appeals rule is 460-RICR-00-00-1, filed under a separate RICR title — Title 460 is "Labor and Training Board of Review," so the adjudicating body publishes its own title. In Iowa the second-level body had its own agency in the rules and a corpus without it was incomplete; here the first body's title is the one that has nothing, and a wake that took the department's title for "the rules" would have published Rhode Island with no appeal procedure whatsoever. units/RI.md A1.

123. Rhode Island is the first covered state whose agency page states the absence of a weekend rule rather than an extension — and it is South Carolina's exact inverse. The weekend question now has an eighth answer, and it is the honest version of the fourth. Rhode Island's general rules of construction contain one computation provision, § 43-3-13, which says only that the first day is not counted; the whole of title 43 chapter 3 contains no Saturday, Sunday or holiday provision. That is the Nevada and South Carolina shape — a general rule exists, a rollover does not. What is new is the agency: where South Carolina's page tells claimants "By law" that a deadline lands on the next business day when the law says no such thing (note 69), Rhode Island's page tells them the deadline is "within 15 calendar days (including weekends and holidays)" — which is what the primary sources actually say. The department is demonstrably able to write a rollover when it wants one: 260-RICR-40-05-1 § 1.7(C) moves an employer contribution deadline off a Sunday or legal holiday. It has not written one for appeals. units/RI.md B2.

124. Rhode Island states its two appeal deadlines twice and the statute and the rule do not agree about what starts the second one. This is the Connecticut pattern (note 55) without Connecticut's excuse. Connecticut's rule and statute diverge because the rule stopped being maintained in 1997; Rhode Island's appeals rule is current — a Periodic Refile effective 4 January 2022 over an Amendment effective 27 November 2018 — and diverges anyway. At the first level the difference is only wording: § 28-44-39(b) says "fifteen (15) days" from mailing, rule § 1.4(A) says "fifteen (15) calendar days" of the mailing date. At the second level the trigger moves: § 28-44-46 runs fifteen days from when the referee's decision "has been mailed to each party's last known address or otherwise delivered," and allows a good-cause extension; rule § 1.17 runs fifteen calendar days from "the Referee's decision" and states no extension. The same shift recurs at judicial review — § 28-44-52 and § 42-35-15(b) run thirty days from mailing, rule § 1.21 from the Board's decision. The agency's own pages side with the statute every time. units/RI.md F1, F3.

125. Rhode Island's subpoena power exists and has no door. R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-42-54 gives the director, the board of review and an appeal tribunal power to compel attendance and production, and § 28-42-55 has the sixth division of the district court enforce it — on the agency's application. All twenty-one sections of 460-RICR-00-00-1 were read; the word "subpoena" does not appear in the appeals rule. The only place in either Rhode Island rule where a party is told how to ask for one is 260-RICR-40-05-1 § 1.16(A)(4)(c)–(d), in the employer-registration-revocation procedure. So this is not the West Virginia case, where reading the second rule showed its own scope clause excluded claimant appeals and that was the finding; here the second rule has the mechanism the first one lacks, and it still does not apply. The witness-fee figure runs the same way: § 28-42-56 delegates the rate to the director and neither rule title publishes one. units/RI.md C4.

126. New Mexico's agency head is a rung of the appeal ladder, not the person who runs it. In every other covered state a party who loses before the first-level referee appeals to a board, commission or panel. In New Mexico they file an "application for appeal and review" with the Secretary of Workforce Solutions, and NMSA 1978 § 51-1-8(H) then gives the Secretary fifteen days and five options: affirm, reverse, modify, remand, or refer the case to the board of review. A Secretary who affirms, reverses or modifies has issued "the final administrative decision of the department" — the board never sees the case, and the next stop is the district court. A Secretary who does nothing has also decided something: "If the secretary takes no action within fifteen days of receipt of the application for appeal and review, the decision shall be promptly scheduled for review by the board of review as though it had been referred by the secretary." The Secretary may also ask the board to review a hearing officer's decision on the Secretary's own initiative, and the board "shall grant the request" if it is made within fifteen days; and may "direct that any pending determination or adjudicatory proceeding be removed to the board of review for a final decision." Florida's commission can initiate its own review of an appeals referee, but that is the appellate body reaching down, not the agency head standing between the two levels. No other unit in this reference records an agency head with power to dispose of a claimant's appeal personally.

127. New Mexico nearly lost its pay-pending-appeal protection in 2013, and which text is law turns on the order the governor signed two bills. NMSA 1978 § 51-1-8(I) is emphatic: benefits "shall be paid promptly in accordance with a determination or a decision" of any level of the ladder "regardless of the pendency" of an appeal, "until such determination or decision has been modified or reversed." Two acts of the 2013 legislature amended the section. The compiler's annotation records that Laws 2013, ch. 132, § 1 "eliminated the right to receive benefits before all appeals have been exhausted," and that ch. 133, § 1 — "as the last act signed by the governor" — is the one set out, with ch. 132's changes reconciled into it under NMSA 1978 § 12-1-8(A). That reconciliation rule is worth reading on its own: where two same-session acts amend one section, "regardless of the effective dates of the acts, the act last signed by the governor shall be compiled." What chapter 132 actually removed was the former first sentence of subsection (J), which had provided that once an allowance was affirmed, "no injunction, supersedeas, stay or other writ or process suspending the payment of benefits shall be issued … and no action to recover benefits paid to a claimant shall be taken." Florida still has that sentence — Fla. Stat. § 443.151(5)(b) bars a court from enjoining payment once an allowance is affirmed in any amount, which is what New Mexico deleted. So the two states now sit either side of the same provision, and New Mexico's survives only in the weaker form of subsection (I). Note also that the annotation's summary reads more broadly than the single deletion it describes: subsection (I) plainly survives and plainly says benefits are paid during an appeal. units/NM.md reports that tension rather than resolving it.

128. Three covered states inherited the same 1930s federal-model fee sentence, and they have done three different things with it. The model text says a claimant may be represented but "no such counsel … shall either charge or receive for such services more than an amount approved by" the agency head or board, and makes exceeding it a crime — a fine of $50 to $500, up to six months' imprisonment, or both. Oklahoma filled the delegation in: 40 O.S. § 2-302(A) carries the sentence and the agency's rule supplies the number, capping counsel at 20% of the claimant's maximum benefit amount on a quantum meruit approval. Kansas did not: K.S.A. 44-718(b) carries the same sentence and neither the statute, K.A.R. 48-3-2, nor anything else read for that page states the figure. New Mexico did not either, and its version is the widest of the three: § 51-1-37(B) runs not to "[a]ny individual claiming benefits" but to "[a]ny individual claiming benefits and any employer," so an employer's counsel or agent is capped on identical terms and faces the same criminal penalty. All five parts of the department's rules — general provisions, rulemaking, claims administration, tax administration and appeals — were searched for a dollar figure, a percentage, an hourly ceiling or an approval procedure, and there is none. Against note 35's taxonomy New Mexico belongs in the approval without a published figure group; what it adds is that the unpriced cap also binds the employer's side, and Oklahoma is the standing demonstration that the delegation can be filled.

129. New Mexico is the only covered state whose supreme court has written a rule of civil procedure for unemployment appeals and nothing else. Rule 1-077 NMRA is captioned "Appeals pursuant to Unemployment Compensation Law" and its paragraph A confines itself to appeals from the board of review or the Secretary under § 51-1-8. It does the work other states leave to a general administrative-appeal rule or to the statute alone: it fixes the thirty-day certiorari clock, states that "[t]he three (3)-day mailing period set forth in Rule 1-006 NMRA does not apply" to it, gives the district court a three-ground standard of review, sets twenty days for the department to file the record, provides that an audio transcript is filed as a duplicate recording, requires no bond, and repeats the statute's protection in the court's own voice — "No individual claiming benefits shall be charged fees of any kind by any court or officer thereof." Other units cite general civil rules that happen to reach these appeals — Arizona's Rule 6, Maine's Rule 6(a) via 1 M.R.S. § 71(12), Montana's rules of civil procedure for service — but none records a court rule addressed to this one statute.

130. New Mexico's weekend protection turns on whether the office was open, and it is the first covered state where that rule is not in the appeals rule at all. (This note called New Mexico "the second covered state" of that kind, amending note 55's "only," until wake 68. A sweep of all forty-one B2 fields found four states whose protection is keyed to office closure with no calendar branch at all: Connecticut, Illinois — "If the last day a document may be filed ... is a day on which the Department facility is closed, the due date is extended to the end of the next day the facility is open" (56 Ill. Adm. Code 2720.10(c)) — Kentucky's regulation, "If a due date of a ... protest, or appeal falls on a day the office or post office is closed, the next day the office or the post office is open shall be considered the due date" (787 KAR 1:230 § 3), and New Mexico. Nine further states carry office closure as one branch beside Saturday, Sunday and holiday: Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky's general statute (KRS 446.030(1)(a)), Massachusetts, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Virginia. The ordinal is gone; what survives is the second half of this note.) 11.3.100.101 NMAC provides that "[i]f the final day for a report, response document or appeal falls on a date when the department offices are closed, receipt on the first business day thereafter shall be considered timely" — Connecticut's mechanism, contingent on an administrative fact rather than a date, with the same two-way divergence from a calendar rule that note 55 describes. Two things distinguish it. First, the rule sits in the department's general provisions part, not in 11.3.500 NMAC, the appeals rule, which says nothing about the calendar; a reader working from the appeal rules alone would conclude no extension exists. Second, the department demonstrably knows how to write the other kind: 11.3.400 NMAC gives employer tax reports a plain Saturday-Sunday-legal- holiday rollover, and 11.3.300 NMAC gives fact-finding replies a weekend-and-holiday rule. The calendar rollover the general law supplies — NMSA 1978 § 12-2A-7(F) — is of uncertain application here, because § 12-2A-1(B) confines the Uniform Statute and Rule Construction Act to statutes enacted and rules adopted on or after 1 July 1997 and § 51-1-8 dates from 1936. units/NM.md records that as an open question rather than answering it.

131. Idaho is the only covered state whose second-level unemployment appeal is decided by the workers' compensation agency — and the rulebook it decides under is not in the state's administrative code. Idaho Code § 72-1368(7) sends a claim for review to the Industrial Commission, whose ordinary docket is workers' compensation, "in accordance with its own rules of procedure not in conflict herewith." Those rules are the Rules of Appellate Practice and Procedure Under the Idaho Employment Security Law, twenty pages, adopted by the Commission under Idaho Code §§ 72-508 and 72-1368(7), effective as amended 9 July 2025 and superseding the Commission's own rules of 29 March 2023. IDAPA title 17 is the Commission's administrative-code title and its one chapter, 17.01.01, is workers' compensation from end to end; the word "unemployment" does not appear in it. Workers'-compensation bodies turn up in nine other units — Iowa's commissioner regulating fees under a different chapter, Rhode Island borrowing workers'-compensation procedure for its route to the supreme court, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and West Virginia giving workers'-compensation matters docket precedence — but in none of them does that body decide the unemployment appeal. units/ID.md A3.

132. Idaho's appeal runs from the second-level body straight to the state's highest court, with no trial court and no intermediate appellate court in between. (This note claimed until wake 60 that Idaho was the only covered state to do it; New Hampshire is the second — see note 137 — and Vermont, added at wake 62, is the third (note 143). The structure is still rare; it is no longer unique, and Vermont is the one of the three whose chapter states no deadline for the appeal at all.) Idaho Code § 72-1368(9) provides that "[a]n appeal may be made to the Supreme Court from decisions and orders of the commission within the times and in the manner prescribed by rule of the Supreme Court," and Idaho Appellate Rule 11(d)(1) makes a final Commission decision appealable as of right. Eleven covered states skip the trial court and land on an intermediate appellate court rather than the court of last resort — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Utah and West Virginia; Rhode Island reaches its supreme court only after a district court. (This note named seven — Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Oregon and Utah — and put West Virginia beside Rhode Island, until wake 68. A sweep of all forty-one F3 fields added Arizona (A.R.S. § 41-1993(B), an application for appeal to the court of appeals filed with the clerk of the appeals board), Colorado ("not a district court", C.R.S. § 8-74-107(2)) and Pennsylvania, whose unit says it sends appeals "straight to an appellate court with no trial court in the chain"; and West Virginia's 2024 amendment to W. Va. Code § 21A-7-17 moved its appeal off the circuit court onto the Intermediate Court of Appeals, which WV.md records together with the surrounding sections that still describe the old route.) Two features travel with the shortcut. Idaho Code § 72-1368(12) switches off the Idaho APA's contested-case and judicial-review provisions "to proceedings involving claimants under the provisions of this chapter," so the general administrative-review chapter never applies; and Idaho Appellate Rule 23(a) sets the filing fee for an Industrial Commission appeal at $94.00 "with the exception of appeals by individual claimants under the employment security law," for whom the same table sets it at none. units/ID.md F3.

133. Two of Idaho's own agency pages describe the same jurisdictional filing deadline differently, and each is accurate where the other is wrong. The Commission's rule, R.A.P.P. Rule 2(D), gives the fax number as 208-332-7558 and allows an emailed or faxed appeal until midnight Mountain Time on the last day; the Commission's main appeals page, stamped 11 July 2025, agrees and puts the cutoff at 11:59 p.m. The Commission's own FAQ, stamped 14 August 2017, states a 5:00 p.m. cutoff and gives a street address the current rule does not use — but has the fax number right. The Department of Labor's appeals page, stamped 24 February 2026, has the address right and gives the fax as 208-332-7588, one digit off. Three sources say 7558 and one says 7588, and the outlier is the page a claimant reading a Department of Labor decision reaches first. What makes this more than untidiness is the Commission's own description of the consequence, on the page that is right: "The Commission has no discretion to extend the appeal period and appeals which are late by even one day, will be dismissed." Agency pages contradicting the rules is a recurring finding in this reference — Maryland, South Carolina, Kentucky and Iowa each supply one. Idaho's is of a different kind twice over: the contradiction is between two agencies rather than inside one, and one half of it is a transcribed digit rather than a stale reading of the law. units/ID.md F1.

134. Idaho extends a deadline that lands on a Sunday and not one that lands on a Saturday, and its electronic-filing rule moves a weekend filing later rather than earlier. Idaho Code § 73-109 excludes a last day only "unless the last is a holiday," and § 73-108's list of holidays opens with "Every Sunday" and never names Saturday; Saturday appears in that section only as a day from which an enumerated holiday is moved, and it is moved backwards — "[a]ny legal holiday that falls on Saturday, the preceding Friday shall be a holiday." Maryland (note 52) and Maine for mailed appeals (note 91) are the other covered states whose extension reaches a Sunday and a holiday but not a Saturday, so the pattern is not new; what is new is the second half. Both Idaho Code § 72-1368(3)(c) and R.A.P.P. Rule 2(D)(2) provide that a faxed or electronically transmitted appeal received on a weekend or holiday "shall be deemed filed on the next business day" — that is, an appeal transmitted on a Saturday that is itself the deadline is deemed filed on Monday, after it. A weekend clause that postpones the filing rather than the deadline is the opposite of the ordinary shape, and no other unit in this reference records one. units/ID.md B2, F1.

135. Idaho's version of the standard protection-of-rights provision keeps the representation sentence and drops the fee sentence. Idaho Code § 72-1375(2) forbids the commission, the director and "any court or any officer thereof" to charge a claimant "fees or costs of any kind in any proceeding under this chapter," makes a violation a misdemeanour, and provides that a claimant "may be represented by counsel or other duly authorized agent." What it does not contain is the clause that follows in many covered states — the cap at a percentage, or at an amount the agency approves. Nothing in chapter 13 or in any of the department's three rule chapters supplies one, and § 72-1375(3) points the other way still, exempting benefits from "levy, execution, attachment, or an order for the payment of attorney's fees." Idaho therefore joins Texas, Colorado, North Carolina and South Carolina in the group with no cap and no approval requirement at all, and is not alone; the interest is in which half of the model sentence survived. Note 35 lists the states with an approval clause and no published figure; Idaho is not one of them, because there is no clause to price. units/ID.md D2.

136. New Hampshire's second rung is a request to reopen, not an appeal, and one route to the third rung skips it entirely. RSA 282-A:60 says "[t]he second level of appeal shall be to the commissioner," and then confines what the commissioner may do to reopening "on the basis of fraud, mistake, or newly discovered evidence." A reopened case goes back to the same appeal tribunal, and RSA 282-A:61 limits the further hearing "to the introduction of evidence or argument relative to and concerning the factors which constitute the basis or ground for the reopening unless the commissioner orders a de novo hearing." So a party who simply disagrees with the tribunal on the facts has no second merits hearing to ask for; the ground has to fit one of the three words. The appellate board is then reached on a third 14-day clock, and RSA 282-A:64, I(b) supplies the one case where the middle rung drops out: an appeal from "[t]he appeal tribunal's decision on an appeal which had been remanded by the appellate board, in which case a request for reopening is not required." units/NH.md A3, F1.

137. New Hampshire is the second covered state whose unemployment appeal reaches the state supreme court with no court below it, and it gets there by a different mechanism from Idaho's. (Vermont became the third at wake 62 — note 143 — by a third mechanism again, and is the only one of the three that publishes no deadline for the appeal.) RSA 282-A:67, II runs the appeal to the New Hampshire Supreme Court on a 30-day clock from mailing, but only for a party "who has exhausted all administrative remedies within the department," which RSA 282-A:67, I makes concrete: a motion for reconsideration or rehearing to the appellate board, filed within 20 days, decided within 30, and deemed denied if the board lets its own 30 days run out (N.H. Code Admin. R. Emab 202.11(b)). Idaho's shortcut required no such motion. Two further features are New Hampshire's own. The court reviews the appeal tribunal's decision rather than the board's — RSA 282-A:67, V says the court "shall not substitute its judgment for that of the appeal tribunal" and shall reverse or modify "the decision of the appeal tribunal" — so the body whose decision is under review is two rungs below the last one the party argued to. And RSA 282-A:68 forecloses every alternative: the route is "exclusive of all other methods of judicial review of unemployment compensation decisions, including extraordinary writs, including the writ of certiorari." This note corrects note 132, which called Idaho the only such state. units/NH.md F2, F3.

138. A rule that would have defeated New Hampshire's postmark deadline is switched off by its own scope clause, and this is the clearest instance in the reference of a scope clause doing real work. RSA 282-A:48 makes an appeal timely if it is "received or, if filed by mail, postmarked" within 14 days. N.H. Code Admin. R. Emp 207.07 presumes a document "filed with the department on the actual date of receipt by the department, as evidenced by a date stamp placed on the document by the department in the normal course of business" — which, applied to an appeal, would delete the postmark alternative for anyone who posted on day fourteen. It does not apply, because Emp 207.02 says the part reaches proceedings under RSA 282-A "only to the extent not addressed in RSA 282-A and in other rules of the department," and RSA 282-A:48 addresses it. The same clause is what lets Emp 207 supply the recording method and the presiding officer's powers, which Emp 202.01 does not give. Elsewhere in this reference a general procedural rule sitting beside a specific one has been a conflict to report (Utah, note 100; Maryland, note 52); here the rulebook resolves it in advance. units/NH.md B1, C3.

139. New Hampshire puts the benefits-pending-appeal choice to the claimant in writing, and the rule that does it covers only half the question. N.H. Code Admin. R. Emp 211.01(d) requires that when a claimant appeals a determination denying continued eligibility, the department "shall notify the claimant of the option to either" continue receiving payments for the denied weeks until the tribunal rules, or "[a]llow benefit payments to be suspended." Subsection (e) pays the suspended weeks if the claimant wins; subsection (f) sends a claimant who kept the money and lost into the overpayment rules, where RSA 282-A:165, II removes liability entirely for a claimant "without fault in causing the overpayment as defined by the rules of the commissioner" and Emp 502.03 defines fault in both directions — departmental error on one side, a knew-or-should-have-known test on the other, judged on the totality of the circumstances including the individual's "physical, mental, educational or linguistic limitations." What no source read addresses is the other half: whether an allowed claimant keeps being paid while the employer appeals. Emp 211.01 is by its terms about a denial the claimant appeals, and the chapter's only express no-stay sentence is at the judicial-review stage (RSA 282-A:67, II). This is a gap that in most covered states is closed by the agency's own claimant handbook; New Hampshire's website could not be reached (note 140). units/NH.md E1, E2.

140. New Hampshire is the seventh covered state published with no agency practice source at all. (This note called it "the first covered state documented with no agency practice source at all" until wake 69. Six units published before it cite none: Virginia, Massachusetts, Arizona, Minnesota, Nevada and Kansas — and units/MN.md had said "Minnesota is the third such state here" since it was written. Vermont was the eighth, Delaware the ninth. The contrast with Vermont stands: New Hampshire's cause was a 403, a fact about a network path, while Vermont's is a publisher's stated policy. Only one of the two is worth re-asking. See note 148.) Every unit in this reference reads the agency's own claimant-facing pages against the rules, and that comparison has produced findings in Maryland, South Carolina, Kentucky, Iowa and Idaho that were invisible from the law alone. www.nhes.nh.gov returns HTTP 403 on every path attempted, including its own robots.txt, from an edge-network access-denied page. That is not a refusal by the publisher and not a policy: nothing was asked and nothing was answered, so the host is recorded as unknown and unused rather than declined — unlike the nine hosts named under the crawl-policy disclosure, each of which said something. The consequences for units/NH.md are concrete and are stated on the page: the appeal form, the filing address and any online route are left as not found in primary source, no field is labelled practice, and the discrepancy-hunting that other units do could not be run. The primary law itself is unusually complete here — the department's whole rules corpus is one file and the statutes carry per-section amendment histories — so the page is not thin; it is built on one leg instead of two.

141. Vermont's statute and its rule name different days as day one, and the section that settles the argument is cited by neither of them. 21 V.S.A. § 1348(a)(2) gives an interested party 30 days "after notice of the determination"; Rule 14 A.2 gives "30 calendar days from the date of the benefit determination." Nine sections away, under the heading "Notices; form and service," § 1357 provides that "[r]egardless of the manner of service and unless otherwise provided, appeal periods shall commence to run from the date of the determination or decision rendered." So the rule is right, the statute's own appeal section is the misleading one, and the answer is the harsher of the two — postal delay comes out of the claimant's 30 days rather than shifting them. Iowa and Utah reach the same destination by a different route (a statute running from mailing or issuance against a rule running from the date printed on the decision), but in both of those the two instruments simply disagree and neither yields. Vermont is the case where a third provision resolves it, and resolves it in favour of the document the claimant is less likely to read. units/VT.md B1.

142. Vermont has no good-cause exception for a late appeal, and what it has instead answers a different question. Nothing in 21 V.S.A. chapter 17 or in the Board's 32 rules states a standard — good cause, excusable neglect, or any other — under which an appeal found to be late proceeds anyway. Rule 14 E is a procedure for arguing the appeal was not late: the ALJ may enter a dismissal order, and an objecting party has ten days after the mailing of that order to ask that it be reconsidered and "the matter be set down for hearing on the timeliness of the appeal." Winning that hearing buys a hearing on the merits; it does not excuse anything. What Vermont does provide is a non-delivery remedy in § 1357: a sworn statement filed with the Commissioner within 60 days after the date of the notice that the notice was not received — or the Commissioner being independently satisfied of that — produces a new notice, from which the appeal period runs afresh. That reaches a claimant the post office failed and no claimant who was ill, confused or badly advised. Vermont therefore joins the covered states offering a late claimant nothing on the written law, and is the first of them to publish a substitute mechanism aimed at one specific cause rather than at hardship generally. units/VT.md B4.

143. Vermont is the third covered state whose unemployment appeal reaches the state supreme court with no court below it, and the first of the three to state no deadline for getting there. 21 V.S.A. § 1349(f) says only that the Board's decision "shall be final unless an appeal to the Supreme Court is taken," and § 1332(d) says the same for the employer's assessment track. There is no trial court and no intermediate appellate court anywhere in the chapter. Idaho supplies its number through the appellate rules it cross-references (42 days, I.A.R. 14(b), note 132) and New Hampshire writes 30 days into the statute itself (RSA 282-A:67, II, note 137). Vermont's chapter states neither a deadline nor a standard of review, and the Vermont Rules of Appellate Procedure — where both would live — are published through a commercial vendor and were not read for this project, so units/VT.md F3 reports both as not found rather than supplying a number. A second Vermont provision travels with the finished decision and has no counterpart in the other two: § 1353 provides that nothing decided under the chapter is "binding, conclusive, or admissible in any separate or subsequent action between an individual and his or her present or former employer," "regardless of whether the prior proceeding was between the same or related parties or involved the same facts." (Corrected at wake 66: this sentence had put in quotation marks a phrase about whom a decision binds that appears in no unit; the words above are the ones units/VT.md quotes.) units/VT.md F3.

144. Vermont is the second covered state whose law is silent on benefits pending appeal in both directions at once, and it is silent while legislating the neighbouring question in unusual detail. (This note said Vermont was the second and Kansas the first until wake 68. Pennsylvania is a third, and was published before either: PA.md E1 says "There is no statute and no regulation on this. The answer is agency practice only," and records NOT FOUND IN PRIMARY SOURCE for the whole field, both directions answered by an agency page rather than by law. Three covered states, not two — and note 98's "first" goes with it.) All 109 sections of 21 V.S.A. chapter 17 and all 32 of the Board's rules were read: nothing says whether a denied claimant is paid during their own appeal, and nothing says whether an allowed claimant keeps being paid during the employer's. The near miss is § 1348(b), which protects benefits already paid from being unwound by a later redetermination absent nondisclosure or misrepresentation — a rule about the reach of a redetermination, not about the interval during an appeal, and units/VT.md E1 records it as checked and set aside. What makes the silence conspicuous is § 1347, rewritten by 2023, No. 184 (Adj. Sess.): it forbids the Commissioner from recovering an overpayment or withholding benefits "until after the Commissioner has made a final determination ... and the person's right to appeal the determination has been exhausted," requires notice of the right to seek a waiver with "clear instructions regarding the circumstances under which a waiver may be granted," and requires a repayment plan geared to letting the person "continue to afford the person's ordinary living expenses." A legislature that wrote all of that did not write the sentence most states use to answer E1. units/VT.md E1, E2.

145. Vermont publishes one subsection of its overpayment statute twice, in two versions with different effective dates, and the difference is the size of the bite. 21 V.S.A. § 1347(d) appears in the chapter under two publisher's brackets. The version effective until the earlier of 1 July 2026 or the occurrence of a stated contingency lets the Commissioner "withhold, in whole or in part, any future benefits payable to the person." The version effective on that earlier date caps it: withholding "in amounts equal to not more than 50 percent of the person's weekly benefit amount." Both are printed, in order, with their conditions stated, and the section's History parenthetical carries both enactments — 2023, No. 184 (Adj. Sess.), § 2, eff. July 1, 2024, and § 3, eff. July 1, 2026 or occurrence of contingency. This is not a conflict and should not be read as one: it is a scheduled change published in advance, the same species as Iowa's rescission dates (note 84) and the opposite of Utah's two current instruments that disagree. A reference that quoted one version and not the other would be wrong for half of its readers. units/VT.md E2.

146. Vermont's fee cap reaches a court, and it is not the only one that does. (This note read "Vermont's fee cap is the fifth published number in this table, and the only one that reaches a court" until wake 68. A sweep of all forty-one D2 fields falsifies both halves. Published numeric caps appear in at least seventeen covered states, not five — Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah, Virginia, Vermont and Wisconsin. And three others reach a court in as many words: Alabama's ten percent runs "in such proceeding or court action" (Ala. Code § 25-4-139), Rhode Island's "in that proceeding or court action but not less than fifty dollars" (R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-44-57(a)), and Kentucky's twenty percent covers a fee charged "before a referee, the commission, or any court, or all three" (787 KAR 1:120 § 1). New York publishes a separate court-only dollar figure. What remains true, and is the point worth keeping, is the contrast with Wisconsin, whose otherwise identical cap says the opposite.) 21 V.S.A. § 1356 caps what "counsel or agents" may "together charge or receive for such services from any individual" at "10 percent of the maximum benefits at issue in such proceedings or court action, except as the Board or the court may allow in exceptional circumstances." The 10 percent, the aggregation and the "maximum benefits at issue" base are Wisconsin's exactly (note 45) — but Wisconsin's statute expressly excludes "any fee charged for representation before a court of law," and Vermont's expressly includes it. The escape valve differs in the same way: Wisconsin requires the department's approval in advance of a higher fee, while Vermont requires nothing in advance and leaves the excess to what "the Board or the court may allow" after the fact, with no provision defining an exceptional circumstance. § 1356 also bars the agency, the referee and the Board from charging an individual "fees of any kind," which pairs with Rule 22's free transcript on appeal to make the administrative route cost the claimant nothing. units/VT.md D2.

147. Vermont's rulebook contains the weekend extension its appeal rules lack, written for the employer's money instead. No provision of 21 V.S.A. chapter 17 or of the Board's appeal rules moves a filing deadline that lands on a Saturday, a Sunday or a holiday; the words "Saturday" and "Sunday" do not occur in the chapter at all. 1 V.S.A. § 138 excludes only the first day of a period, and 1 V.S.A. § 371(b) governs when state offices observe a holiday rather than when a period ends. So Vermont's answer is Oregon's — no extension found in any primary source (note 57) — but it arrives differently. Rule 6 G moves an employer's contribution payment that falls "on a weekend or legal holiday" to "the first business day thereafter," and Rule 6 H makes a mailed contribution payment effective on its postmark; both sit in Wage Reports and Contributions and neither reaches an appeal. The rules even define "Business day" (Rule 2 C) and "Holiday" (Rule 2 M) and then attach neither definition to a filing period. units/VT.md B2.

148. Vermont is the only covered state published with no agency practice source where the reason is a publisher's stated policy rather than a failed request. (This note called Vermont "the second covered state published with no agency practice source" until wake 69. It was the eighth; see note 140 for the other seven and Delaware after. Of the nine, Virginia's unit gives no reason, and every other gives a failed request.) New Hampshire, the nearest comparison, had an HTTP 403 on every path including robots.txt — a fact about a network path, from which nothing about the publisher's intent could be read (note 140). labor.vermont.gov answers normally and states a position. It puts anthropic-ai, ClaudeBot and Claude-Web each in their own group, each Disallow: /, and then stacks Claude-User, ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and DuckAssistBot over one shared permissive rule set under a comment giving the criterion: bots that "fetch a single page in real time because a human asked an AI assistant a direct question," which "are not bulk crawlers and do not feed model training." The line is drawn by conduct, not by name, and this project's wakes run unattended on a schedule and collect corpora, which puts them on the crawler side of it. Only robots.txt was fetched from that host and nothing from it is cited. The two states end in the same place — no practice source, every agency-shaped gap published as not found — by findings of opposite kinds, and only one of them is worth a later wake re-asking. units/VT.md Sources.

149. Delaware raised five of its six appeal deadlines in one 2023 act and left the sixth alone — and the one it left is the one that reaches a court. 84 Del. Laws, c. 150 (House Bill 176), approved 9 August 2023 and effective 1 October 2023, went through 19 Del. C. ch. 33 changing 10 to 15: the appeal to the tribunal (§ 3318(b)), the appeal to the Board (§ 3318(c)), the period before a Board decision becomes final (§ 3322(a)), the appeal from an overpayment recoupment order (§ 3325(d)), and an employer's appeal on assessment liability (§ 3344(c)). § 3323(a), the ten days to commence an action in the Superior Court, is untouched. The same act also wrote the weekend-and-holiday rule and the calendar-days default into § 3304 (note 150). Two consequences worth separating. First, every secondary source compiled before October 2023 — including the U.S. Department of Labor's Comparison of State Unemployment Insurance Laws, whose most recent edition as of 2026 is 2023 — reports Delaware as a ten-day state, and is describing a repealed number. Maine is the same story from six wakes earlier and it is worth reading the two together (note 90): PL 2023, c. 53 doubled Maine's first-level period from fifteen days to thirty, effective 25 October 2023, three weeks after Delaware's act took effect. Both acts print the old number struck through beside the new one, so both changes are exactly dateable; both remain unreported outside the code. The difference is what got left behind — Maine's own appeal rule still recites the superseded fifteen, so a claimant reading the rule is told the wrong deadline, while Delaware's rules never stated a deadline at all and so could not go stale. Two covered states in one legislative year lengthened the first-level deadline, which is a caution about the whole column: an uncited number in this field has a shelf life. Second, the surviving ten days is now the shortest deadline anywhere in the Delaware chain and it sits at the end of it, where a claimant has already been through two hearings; and because § 3344(c) was raised, an employer contesting its assessment now gets fifteen days to reach the same court that a claimant gets ten to reach. units/DE.md B1, F3, G.

150. Delaware's answer to the weekend question is the cleanest instance in this table of a shape already on the list, and its own chapter carries it. The recurring difficulty in this column is that the extension usually lives somewhere other than the appeal law — in a general title (Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota), in an agency rule (Indiana, West Virginia), in an office-closure clause (Connecticut, Alabama), or nowhere at all (Oregon). Delaware's is in 19 Del. C. § 3304, inside the unemployment chapter, and it says the whole thing in three sentences: a document mailed to the Department is filed on the day it is mailed; an act whose last day falls on "Saturday, Sunday or a holiday" may be done "on the first ensuing day that is not a Saturday, Sunday or holiday"; and "[u]nless otherwise specified, all references to days in this chapter shall mean calendar days." One section answers B1's trigger question, B2 entirely, and the calendar-versus-business question for every deadline in the chapter. Kansas's is the nearest comparison and it is narrower — written into the appeal statute, but with a scope sentence that names only two of its three deadlines (note 94). The catch in Delaware is placement rather than content: § 3304 sits in subchapter I, nine sections before the first appeal provision, and nothing in §§ 3318 through 3323 points at it. A reader who opens the appeal sections and stops there will find no weekend rule, no mailbox rule, and no statement that the days are calendar days. units/DE.md B1, B2.

151. Delaware is the only covered state whose second-level hearing is required by rule to be in person, and it is the same rule that refuses to look at a video. No other unit in this reference records a mandatory in-person hearing at either level. Every other state in this table either sets a remote default and lets a party ask for a room (Connecticut, Iowa, North Carolina, Kansas — notes 55, 89, 105), or leaves format to practice. Delaware's Appeal Board writes the opposite default: "All parties to the appeal and any witnesses shall be present in-person at the Board's hearing" (19 Del. Admin. Code 1201 § 4.2), with ten minutes' grace before the Board may proceed without a party or dismiss the appeal. The rest of § 4 is of a piece: no cell phones, smart watches or recording devices in the room and no large bags (§§ 4.2.1, 4.2.2); hearings booked for twenty minutes, forty if a lawyer appears (§ 4.5); a continuance request in writing by noon the day before or not at all (§§ 4.4.1.1, 4.4.2); and — the part that reaches evidence rather than decorum — "[t]he Board does not permit electronic evidence, such as video or audio, to be submitted or entered into evidence at a hearing," nor may it "review evidence submitted by USB drive, CD, or other external electronic devices" (§§ 4.7.5, 4.7.6). A recording of the thing in dispute cannot be shown to the body deciding it. The first level is the mirror image: 19 Del. Admin. Code 1201 governs the Board and nothing else, so the hearing before the appeals referee — the hearing most claimants actually get — has no published procedure at all, and § 3318(c)'s "reasonable opportunity for fair hearing" is the whole of the law on it. units/DE.md C1, C3.

152. Delaware states the pay-pending-appeal rule twice, prospectively limits the give-back, and then forbids any court from staying it — and still never says what happens to a denied claimant. On the employer-appeal half this is among the most explicit texts in the table: § 3318(b) provides that a Claims Deputy award "shall be paid promptly … upon its issuance" and that if an appeal is filed "benefits shall be paid in accordance with such determination notwithstanding such appeal," and § 3318(c) writes the identical structure one rung up for an appeal tribunal award pending Board review. Both then limit the consequence of losing: a reversal governs benefits "for the weeks of unemployment following the issuance" of the reversing decision, not the weeks already paid. § 3323(c) closes the far end — a petition for judicial review "shall not act as a supersedeas or stay," and neither the Board nor any court may enter one that would "delay the payment of any benefits to which the claimant has been determined to be entitled." What follows a reversal is instead handled as an overpayment, and § 3325(a) names this exact person: liability attaches whether or not the claimant "was legally awarded the payment of benefits at the time but on appeal was subsequently found not to be entitled thereto," with waiver available for a non-fraud overpayment whose recovery "would be against equity and good conscience" (§ 3325(h)(1)a.). The other half of the field is simply absent. No provision addresses payment to a claimant whose own denial is under appeal; every payment sentence in § 3318 is conditioned on a determination or decision that awards benefits, so the structure points one way and the words never say it. units/DE.md E1, E2.

What the forty-one states show

(Every count in this section was re-derived from all forty-one units at wake 65. The previous derivation was made at wake 56 against thirty-eight, and three states — New Hampshire, Vermont and Delaware — had been added since without the denominators moving. They have now moved: every count below is a statement about all forty-one covered states, and where a claim rests on fewer, it says so. Where this section and a unit disagree, the unit wins.)

Re-deriving found seven things the wake-56 counts had wrong, and they are marked in place below. One is not arithmetic and matters more than the rest: wake 56 put quotation marks around words no Massachusetts source contains. Correcting wake 51's tie-breaker count, it reported that Massachusetts "runs its ten days from 'whichever occurs first' of hand delivery or mailing." The statute says neither of those words. M.G.L. c. 151A, § 39(b) reads "within ten days after delivery in hand by the commissioner's authorized representative, or mailing of said notice" — the same untie-broken pair as Missouri's, Kansas's, Oklahoma's and Louisiana's. "Whichever occurs first" is the phrasing of units/MA.md's own section heading, written by the wake that drafted the unit as a summary of the two-event structure, and a later wake read the heading as if it were the law. The count of explicit tie-breakers goes back to three. On a page whose entire claim is that quoted words are the law's words, a quotation assembled from a summary is the worst defect available, and it was introduced by the wake that was checking the counts. UNITS.md predicted this exact failure at wake 58 — "a page that synthesises across units can quote things no unit ever published, and nothing catches it until the synthesis is checked against the units." It went on to survive nine wakes on the live site.

The other six are ordinary and are corrected below: Iowa was filed under the wrong late-appeal heading; Kansas was said to have no overpayment waiver when it has two; Massachusetts, Utah and Maine change three separate counts about deadlines written twice; Pennsylvania is not alone in keying its clock to a printed date; New York is not alone in conditioning second-level review on conduct below, nor in extinguishing liability rather than waiving it; and Minnesota is not alone in making its middle rung unskippable.

• The first-level deadline ranges from 7 to 45 days — a factor of six and a half — and no national rule of thumb exists. For a claimant the floor is 7 days, reached in two states and in both only where the notice was handed over; the shortest unconditional deadline in the table is still West Virginia's 8 days (note 86), and the longest is Minnesota's 45.

Five of the forty-one states write the number twice on purpose, for four different reasons, and wake 56 counted four for three. New Jersey splits by party (7 days for the employer, 21 for the claimant, note 18); Arizona and Alabama split by mode of service (7 days if the notice was handed over in person, 15 if it was mailed — notes 32 and 102); Oregon splits by which kind of decision is under appeal (10 days for a monetary determination, 20 for an allow-or-deny decision); and Massachusetts splits by claimant category — 430 CMR 4.13(4) gives 60 calendar days rather than 10 to a claimant whose determination was not provided in the language the statute entitles them to. That is the only deadline in the table that varies by a characteristic of the claimant rather than by what the agency did or what was decided, and it is six times the ordinary window.

Two more write it twice by accident, and the second one is new to this count. Utah's statute says 10 days and the rule that implements it says 15, both current, neither yielding. Maine is the same defect pointing the other way, and it is worse. Its statute has said 30 calendar days since a 2023 act; its own rule, 12-172 C.M.R. ch. 11 § 3, still says fifteen, last substantively amended in 2004 and never conformed. Utah's stale instrument is the generous one, so a claimant who believes the rule has more time than the statute gives. Maine's stale instrument is the stingy one — the rule a claimant is actually handed cuts the statutory period in half, and a claimant who believes it and misses day 15 may abandon an appeal that the statute says had another fortnight to run. Note 90 records the 2023 lengthening; what this derivation adds is that Maine never told its own rulebook.

A longer deadline does not mean a softer one. Three states foreclose a late appeal outright: Texas, whose rule says flatly there is no good-cause exception; Minnesota, which has the longest deadline in the table, 45 days, and then orders the judge to dismiss anything filed after it (note 37); and Idaho, whose statute says an appeal not filed in time "shall be dismissed on such grounds" (Idaho Code § 72-1368(3)(c)). Ten more have no excuse provision anywhere in the written law that was read — Illinois, New Jersey, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, Indiana, Louisiana, and now Iowa, Delaware and Vermont. In most of them a "good cause" standard does exist nearby and governs something else, almost always a missed hearing rather than a missed deadline. (This re-derivation moves Iowa into this group. Wake 56 listed it among the states that "name a standard without defining one"; units/IA.md says the opposite in terms — "Neither Iowa Code § 96.6 nor 871 IAC chapter 26 states a good-cause, excusable-neglect, or other standard ... That is a searched-and-not-found, not a rule saying no." Delaware and Vermont are the two new states, and Delaware's § 3318(b) is a finality sentence rather than a bar, which is why it sits here and not with Texas.)

So on the written law alone, thirteen of forty-one states offer a late claimant nothing. Nine more give this reference no answer to publish, and they divide: eight name a rescue and never say what it is — Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, Rhode Island, Virginia and West Virginia all write "good cause" and none of them defines it — and Pennsylvania's rescue is judge-made, so no primary source states it at all. (Wake 56 counted only North Carolina and Iowa in this second group and left the other six in neither. The buckets are now exhaustive: three foreclosed, ten silent, eight undefined, one case-law-only, and nineteen that write a standard with actual content in it.)

• The trigger event is not the same kind of thing in every state, and two states key the clock to a date printed on the document rather than to anything anyone did with it. Pennsylvania is the known one — § 501(e) runs from the "Determination Date" on the notice, so postal delay eats the claimant's window instead of shifting it. Vermont is the second, and it says so more bluntly than Pennsylvania does: 21 V.S.A. § 1357 provides that "[r]egardless of the manner of service and unless otherwise provided, appeal periods shall commence to run from the date of the determination or decision rendered." (Wake 56 said "Pennsylvania alone keys it to a date printed on the notice." Vermont was added at wake 62 and falsifies it.) The two are not equally harsh, and the difference is instructive: Vermont pairs its rule with a remedy Pennsylvania has no equivalent of — a party who files a sworn statement within sixty days that the notice never arrived gets a fresh notice and a fresh appeal period. Pennsylvania's printed date simply runs.

Pennsylvania's shape also appears twice more by accident, where the rule does what the statute did not: Iowa's statute runs from when the determination "was issued" while its contested-case rule runs from "the date noted on the initial determination," and Utah's statute runs from mailing while its rule runs from "the date on the Department decision." In both, the text a claimant is likelier to be shown has quietly become Pennsylvania's rule.

That is one instance of a larger and more actionable finding, and it is half again as common as wake 56 reported. In twelve of the forty-one states the trigger written in the statute is not the trigger written in the rule or on the agency's own page. Ten of the twelve are statute-against-rule: Connecticut's statute was amended in 2016 to run from notice being "provided" and its regulation still says "mailed"; West Virginia's statute says "delivered or mailed" and the Board of Review's own rule says mailing alone; Montana's statute says "sent" and its redetermination rule says "service"; Nebraska's statute says "sent" and its rule measures from the "Date Mailed"; New Mexico's statute runs from "the date of notification or mailing" while its rule runs from "the date of transmission"; Iowa's and Utah's are above; Oklahoma's rule drops the statute's alternative branch for a notice that was never mailed, restating the mailing trigger alone; Maryland describes one event four different ways across four provisions that all set the same 15 days, with nothing saying which governs if they came apart (note 48); and New York's statute runs from "mailing or personal delivery" while 12 NYCRR § 461.1 measures the claimant's own filing from receipt, against a presumption that receipt happened five business days after the recited mailing date. New York's is the only one of the twelve where the rule is more generous than the statute. The other two are statute-against-agency-page: New Jersey's statute starts the employer's seven days at confirmed receipt while the Division's own page says mailing, and Oregon's statute is delivery-first with mailing as the alternative while the agency's page states mailing alone. None of these is a small difference. Each names a different day as day one.

Three states write an explicit tie-breaker, not four. Washington and North Carolina take the earlier of notification or mailing — an electronic notice can start the clock before a mailed copy would, and North Carolina uses that trigger at every administrative level — and Wisconsin takes the earliest of electronic delivery, mailing or hand delivery, "whichever first occurs" (§ 108.09(2r)), which puts electronic delivery on the same footing as mailing for every party rather than only for one who opted into it. Massachusetts is not a fourth; see the correction at the head of this section. Vermont's § 1357 is a tie-breaker of a different and stronger kind: rather than choosing among transmission events it makes the manner of service irrelevant.

Several states name two or more starting events and then say nothing about which controls if both could apply: Missouri's "either delivered in person or mailed" (§ 288.070.6), Kansas's mailing-or-delivery, Oklahoma's, Louisiana's, and Massachusetts'. Maryland's four phrasings are above, though it fixes the filing end generously, counting the appeal as filed on the earliest of hand delivery, postmark, the date written on an illegibly postmarked appeal, or electronic receipt. And two states run their clocks from a word they never define: Minnesota from "sending" (units/MN.md B1), Oregon from "delivery."

At the other end, nine states let the claimant's actual experience of the notice matter, in four distinct mechanisms — wake 56 found four states and one mechanism. Ohio lets proven non-receipt restart the clock outright, and Idaho does the same where the party proves postal or departmental error caused the failure (§ 72-1368(3)(d)) — the same relief, conditioned on proving whose error, and the only softening in a state that otherwise forecloses a late appeal entirely. Vermont's sworn-statement route is a third form of the same thing. Wisconsin measures the period from actual receipt for a party who first receives the determination after it has already run, through no fault of their own (Wis. Admin. Code § DWD 140.01(2)(a)), and New York's regulation measures from receipt as its default. Michigan, Massachusetts, Utah and Arizona each list non-receipt or postal delay as a named good-cause ground rather than as a trigger. "21 days" and "20 days" are not comparable numbers in the way they look.

• Deadlines do not have to get longer as you climb — and mostly they do not change at all. Of the forty states with a second administrative step, thirty repeat the first-level number exactly, five lengthen it, and five shorten it. The lengtheners are Iowa (10 to 15), Massachusetts (10 to 30, the hardest climb in the table), Utah (10 or 15 to 30), Wisconsin (14 to 21) and New Jersey's employer, whose window stretches from 7 to 20. The shorteners are New York (30 to 20), New Jersey's claimant (21 to 20), Maine (30 to 15), Nebraska (20 to 10) and North Carolina (30 to 10, the sharpest tightening in the table, note 23). New Jersey is the one state that appears in both lists, because its two parties start from different places and converge on the same 20. Arizona cannot be placed: its statute gives 30 days at the second level and its rules give 15, and units/AZ.md does not decide which governs, so Arizona is a lengthening or a repetition depending on which instrument a reader is holding. Maryland has the same problem in a smaller way — two provisions give 15 days and a third makes the decision below final after 10.

Four states run one number through the whole chain — Minnesota's 45, Kansas's 16, Louisiana's 15 and Nevada's 11. Note 36 called this Minnesota's alone; it is not, and the three new states did not join it. Delaware came close enough to be worth naming as the counter-example: 15 days to the tribunal, 15 to the Board, and then 10 to the Superior Court, the surviving remnant of a 2023 act that lengthened five deadlines and missed the sixth (note 149). Nevada's is the most thoroughgoing: eleven days to the Appeal Tribunal, eleven for a determination to become final, eleven to the Board of Review, eleven more before the Board's decision is final, and eleven again to commence the action in district court — and two of those run one after the other rather than together, which is a trap the single repeated number hides rather than shows.

• Second-level review is not always of right, and the commonest reason is one shape repeated. Nebraska has no second-level body at all — a party goes from the hearing officer to the district court, with only a discretionary request that the same officer reconsider — and Minnesota has no separate one either: the same judge reconsiders. Of the thirty-nine states with a separate second-level body, review is not simply of right in seventeen, and they fall into families rather than into seventeen separate inventions.

• Six switch discretion off only where the level below changed the outcome. New Jersey's board "may permit" further appeals generally but "shall permit" them from a decision that is not unanimous and from a determination that was overruled or modified (note 19); Louisiana, Nevada, Maryland, Utah and Kansas each write a version of the same rule — Utah's "shall be allowed as of right if the decision of the administrative law judge did not affirm the department's prior decision" (§ 35A-1-304(1)(b)) is Maryland's trigger almost word for word, and Kansas's board "shall permit such further appeal" only from a referee's decision "that overrules or modifies the decision of an examiner" (K.S.A. 44-709(f)(7)). The practical effect is uniform across all six and worth stating plainly: the party who lost twice is the party whose appeal is discretionary.

• Five are discretionary outright. Florida's commission "may allow" an appeal by application, and if it declines, the referee's decision becomes the commission's own; Ohio's "may allow or disallow the request for review," the disallowance itself then opening the courthouse door; and Missouri's, Alabama's and Massachusetts' — the last combining discretion with a clock, below.
• Two condition it on conduct below, and they condition it on different parties. Maine's fifteen days are open only to a party who actually appeared at the hearing and was warned in writing beforehand what missing it would cost (§ 1194(3)) — a condition neither agency page mentions. New York does the same to one side only: § 621(1) lets "the claimant and the employer, provided he appeared at the hearing" appeal to the appeal board, and the proviso sits against the employer. (Wake 56 gave this family to Maine alone.)
• New Hampshire is its own shape, and it is the most restrictive in the table. Its middle rung is the commissioner, whose power is not to hear an appeal but to reopen, and only "on the basis of fraud, mistake, or newly discovered evidence" (RSA 282-A:60). That rung is also effectively unskippable: the appellate board's own rule takes appeals from "[t]he commissioner's decision on a request for reopening," so an ordinary party reaches the board through a discretionary gate on three named grounds. The board may then itself decline a case that "presents no substantial question within the appellate board's jurisdiction" (RSA 282-A:64, IV). Both rungs are discretionary, and the first is mandatory.
• Three cannot be answered, and Delaware is the new one. South Carolina's statute says the department "must permit further appeals" while its regulation frames the same step as leave to appeal; Rhode Island's § 28-44-47 says an appeal to the Board "shall be allowed" while § 28-44-51 is written on the assumption that the Board may decline one. Delaware is the same conflict across instrument types: 19 Del. C. § 3320(a) says the Board "may permit any of the parties to such decision to initiate further appeal before it" — the permissive New Jersey shape, with no "shall permit" counterpart anywhere — while 19 Del. Admin. Code 1201 § 3.1.1 gives a Board hearing to "[e]ither party ... upon filing a timely Notice of Appeal." Nothing read reconciles them, and units/DE.md quotes both without choosing.

Eight states put an enforceable clock on the second level, and they point in five directions. Illinois' forces a decision out — 120 days, extendable 30 for good cause, after which a party may demand a Notice of Right to Sue, and a Board decision issued after the Board misses its own 14-day response window is null and void (note 13). Massachusetts' turns silence into a denial: grant or deny within 21 days, or the application is deemed denied, which is itself the appealable event (note 30). New Hampshire's does the same at the reconsideration stage — the appellate board has 30 calendar days to rule on a motion for reconsideration, failing which "the board's original decision shall be considered adopted" and the request is deemed denied, and the board must separately either decide within 15 business days of a hearing or adopt the tribunal's decision outright. Iowa's deems a rehearing application denied at 20 days. Alabama's turns silence into a bypass — 10 days to grant permission, failing which the applicant may go straight to the circuit court in the 10 days after that — undercut by a departmental rule giving the Board 30 days instead. Louisiana's board must decide within 60 days, and a refusal converts the referee's decision into a board decision so that judicial review stays open. West Virginia's is the one with no teeth: the Board "must" issue a decision within 10 days of the hearing, and nothing says what follows if it does not. New Mexico's is the fifth direction, and no other covered state occupies it: silence promotes the case rather than disposing of it. A party who loses before the hearing officer applies to the Secretary, who has fifteen days to act; and "[i]f the secretary takes no action within fifteen days of receipt of the application for appeal and review, the decision shall be promptly scheduled for review by the board of review as though it had been referred by the secretary" (NMSA 1978 § 51-1-8(H)). In the other thirty-two, no clock was found, and a stalled board is just a wait.

One more thing the new states changed. Note 38 called Minnesota's reconsideration step "mandatory in a way no other covered state's second level is" — its wording until this wake, which amended it. New Hampshire's request to reopen is a second, and it is the harder of the two, because Minnesota's unskippable step is available to everyone as of right while New Hampshire's is discretionary on three named grounds. Note 38 is amended accordingly. (The sentence this paragraph replaced attributed to note 38 a phrase — "the one thing in this table a party may not skip" — that note 38 does not contain; it was the old closing section's own paraphrase, quoted back as if it were the note. Caught by the quote checker in the same run that confirmed the Massachusetts defect above.)

• Where a case lands in court is structurally different, not just procedurally — and most trial courts do not act like trial courts. Fifteen of forty-one states send the case straight to an appellate court with no trial court at all: New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey (resting on agency practice rather than statute, note 20), Arizona, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Colorado, West Virginia, Utah and Indiana — and Idaho, New Hampshire and Vermont, which go further than any of them and file directly in the state supreme court, with no intermediate appellate court either. Twenty-six file in a trial court, Delaware's Superior Court being the newest.

But only two of those twenty-six retry the facts. Texas is one — "trial de novo based on the substantial evidence rule," a stated hybrid — and Alabama is the other, in the blunter words of the two: "Trial in the circuit court shall be de novo." The remaining twenty-four are confined to the record. Trial-court venue does not imply trial-court fact-finding, and in twenty-four states it implies the opposite. The same evidentiary mistake at a hearing is fixable in Texas and Alabama and effectively fatal in the other thirty-nine — something Minnesota, alone, says to the parties in advance, its rules requiring the notice of hearing to state that the hearing "is the only procedure available under the law at which a party may present evidence."

Nebraska is a third shape and a trap for a reader who counts words. Neb. Rev. Stat. § 84-917(5)(a) says review "shall be conducted by the court without a jury de novo on the record of the agency." A claimant reading "de novo" has every reason to think the facts are open again; what the phrase actually buys is non-deferential review of a record that is already closed. Nebraska's court will not defer to the agency's findings and will not hear a witness either.

Three states occupy categories of their own. Arizona has no trial court and no guaranteed hearing in the appellate one: the Court of Appeals grants or denies the application, and a denial ends the case (note 34). South Carolina's first stop is the Administrative Law Court, a court of record sitting inside the executive branch rather than the judiciary, with the judicial branch reached only at the step after. And California's route is a writ rather than an appeal — administrative mandamus in the superior court under CCP § 1094.5, where the reweighing that happens is a matter of case law rather than of the statute. Missouri and Indiana each reach an appellate court through two sequential clocks rather than one, Missouri filing its notice of appeal at the commission rather than the court (note 42).

• How much of the answer is even written down varies enormously. Florida legislates its late-appeal standard and its outer bar; Ohio legislates even its late-appeal excuses sentence by sentence; Pennsylvania leaves the equivalent doctrine entirely to case law and leaves benefits-pending-appeal to a webpage; Illinois writes down an elaborate Board-inaction remedy but no late-appeal excuse at all; Michigan's written law is current-but-stale in a way all its own — its freshly amended statute names an abolished tribunal (note 16); New Jersey writes its pay-pending scheme and its overpayment-waiver standard directly into statute, more than any other covered state, yet leaves every parameter of judicial review to a web page (note 20). Delaware supplies the sharpest instance of all and it is an absence: 19 Del. Admin. Code 1201 governs the Appeal Board and nothing else, so the hearing most claimants actually attend — the one before the appeals referee — has no published procedure at all, and § 3318(c)'s "reasonable opportunity for fair hearing" is the whole of the law on it (note 151). Two states can have the same practical rule and completely different amounts of law behind it — which is precisely what a citation-first reference is for. And Missouri shows that writing more down does not always settle more: it is the most explicit state in this table on exhaustion and on late-appeal good cause, and simultaneously the one whose overpayment exposure is least determinable, because two current sections contradict each other by name (note 43).

• Benefits keep flowing while an employer appeals — wherever the question can be answered, and how firmly that is written down is where the states separate. Twenty-two of the forty-one answer it in a statute that speaks to the pendency of an appeal directly. Ten more rest on a statute the unit reads onto the question but which never mentions who filed the appeal — Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Washington and Alabama, every one of them flagged as an inference in its own unit. (Wake 56 counted five of these ten — Texas, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and Maine — as statutory, which is why its figure was twenty-seven and this one is twenty-two. Neither number is wrong so much as differently drawn: a sentence saying benefits are paid "regardless of any appeal" plainly covers an employer's appeal, and equally plainly does not say so. The units call it an inference, and where a unit and this section disagree, the unit wins.)

Four more have a statute that covers only part of the interval. Arizona's § 23-773(B) covers only the stretch after a tribunal or the board has affirmed an allowance and says nothing about the deputy-allows-then-employer-appeals interval, which units/AZ.md records as a gap rather than filling; Utah's guarantee lives in a rule and stops at the ALJ; Iowa's is tied to an affirmance and leaves the run-up to it unaddressed; and North Carolina's only explicit provision governs the court-to-appellate leg. Pennsylvania is alone in having only an agency web page: § 511 was repealed in 1978 and never replaced.

In four states the question has no answer in the primary sources at all, up from two. Kansas's unit records "NOT FOUND IN PRIMARY SOURCE — neither direction" after reading K.S.A. 44-709 in full and the K.A.R. agency 48 and 50 rules; Vermont's records the same after all 109 sections of 21 V.S.A. chapter 17 and all thirty-two Board rules; and Nevada and New Hampshire each answer the denied claimant's half and leave the employer's half unwritten. An earlier version of this bullet said benefits keep flowing in every state examined so far. That generalised from the states that answer the question to the states that do not.

The mechanisms differ more than the outcome does. The cleanest never mention who filed the appeal: Wisconsin, Maryland, Maine, Montana and Texas fix payment to whichever decision is currently operative (note 46 for Wisconsin, note 51 for Maryland), and Minnesota writes two sentences in two sections — one for an allowing determination, one for an allowing decision — together covering every interval from the first allowance to the Court of Appeals, exactly the span Arizona leaves half-unwritten. Delaware writes the same structure twice, once at each rung, and keys it explicitly to who won below.

The exposure if the employer wins is where the states genuinely diverge, and the claim that Kansas has no waiver was wrong. Eight states give a claimant no general escape from repaying a good-faith, no-fault overpayment: Texas, Ohio, Minnesota, Kentucky, Iowa, West Virginia, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Four of them are pointed about it. Kentucky's only waiver command is bounded by its own opening words to claims filed between 27 January 2020 and 6 September 2021, and reversal on appeal is expressly excluded from the sole "office error" exception. Minnesota bars the commissioner from compromising an overpayment at all, while being the only covered state that extinguishes the debt on its own after six years (note 31). Iowa's one non-recovery rule needs the employer to have sat out the initial determination. Oklahoma's obligation cannot be waived but can only be collected by offset within two benefit years, which limits the remedy rather than the debt. New Mexico's waiver machinery is scoped only to federally funded programs and leaves an ordinary state-benefit overpayment with none. Missouri's exposure cannot be determined at all — two current sections contradict each other by name (note 43) — and Florida's is unsettled in a smaller way, its bar on recoupment from future benefits sitting beside an untouched power to sue.

(Kansas does not belong on that list and wake 56 put it there. K.S.A. 44-719(d)(1) carries two waivers — one for a no-fault overpayment, available at any time, and one on an equity-or-extreme- hardship finding after five years. The reason the old derivation missed them is worth recording: units/KS.md had no E2 field at all until wake 58, two wakes after that derivation was made, and the count was taken from a unit that was silent because it was incomplete rather than because Kansas was. check_fields.py, written at wake 58 to catch exactly that, did not exist yet.)

At the other end, six states never create the liability rather than forgiving it, and wake 56 named one. New York's § 597(4) simply does not impose a repayment obligation for benefits accepted in good faith; New Hampshire's RSA 282-A:165, II says "[l]iability shall not exist" where the claimant is without fault; and Pennsylvania reaches the same place from the other side — a non-fault overpayment is not repayable, only deductible from future benefits and capped at one third, and even that recoupment is barred where the overpayment is created by "a subsequent reversal of two decisions of eligibility," a bar aimed squarely at the claimant paid during an appeal. California, Nevada and Rhode Island write the same structure with conditions attached — each says the claimant is not liable, or that there shall be no recovery, where the overpayment was without fault and recovery would be against equity and good conscience (Cal. Unemp. Ins. Code § 1375; NRS 612.365(1); R.I. Gen. Laws § 28-42-68(d)). The line between "mandatory waiver" and "no liability" is mostly drafting, and in those three the no-liability form still routes the equity finding through an official's judgment, which is what a discretionary waiver does.

Five states make waiver mandatory on stated conditions: Michigan ("contrary to equity and good conscience," recoupment capped at 50% of each payment), New Jersey (mandatory on request across four statutory circumstances and self-executing where the overpayment came from division or employer error, note 21), Virginia ("shall waive," in a version that sunsets 1 July 2028), Wisconsin, and Nebraska, whose § 48-665(1) bars recoupment by withholding future benefits for a faultless claimant while leaving civil action and tax-refund setoff untouched — a waiver of the remedy most claimants meet and not of the debt. Oregon's is mandatory only for overpayments caused by a change in the law.

A waiver labelled mandatory can be narrower than one labelled discretionary, and the two clearest instances both bite on exactly the situation this page describes. Wisconsin's mandatory waiver requires departmental error, and § 108.22(8)(c)2 forecloses treating a reversal on appeal as departmental error — so the ordinary reversed allowance does not qualify. Virginia's is mandatory, better-defined than most, and expressly unavailable for an overpayment caused by "a reversal in the appeals process" (note 27). Florida has a carve-out of the same self-executing kind for an overpayment caused by the employer's failure to respond in time.

The remaining states leave it to discretion, and the definitions carry the weight: North Carolina's hardship test names the loss of "minimal necessities of food, medicine, and shelter" with 180- and 360-day duration thresholds; Washington presumes waiver warranted at or below 70% of the Lower Living Standard Income Level and Utah uses the same 70% figure; Indiana uses 65% of the federal poverty guidelines, against the 150% that Michigan's mandatory waiver uses — one measure of how little the mandatory/discretionary label settles; Maryland requires both no fault and inability to pay; Illinois adds a recoupment cap of 25% of the weekly benefit; Delaware presumes waiver for a current low-income public-assistance recipient; and Massachusetts defines neither of its two phrases (note 31).

Coverage

Forty-one of fifty states. Nothing here should be generalized to an uncovered state; the forty-one covered differ from each other on every column in the table. Georgia remains parked, but no longer for the reason this paragraph first gave — that its code and rules sites refused plain fetches when probed at the wake that added New Jersey. Wakes 41 and 46 re-probed it: the rules read cleanly from Cornell LII, and the statutes read cleanly too but are stale, the only free full text being the 2017 O.C.G.A. with no free route to the amendments since. Georgia is rejected on currency, not on access, and MACHINE.md carries the condition that would reverse it. Massachusetts is the first covered state whose agency is unreachable from this machine: www.mass.gov returns HTTP 403 to every request, so units/MA.md cites no practice page at all and answers "not found" where other units would have cited one. Arizona is the second such state — des.az.gov also returns HTTP 403 here — and it fails the other way round from Massachusetts on the law itself: Arizona's statutes are the cleanest static text this project has found (plain per-section HTML at azleg.gov), while its Secretary of State refuses the administrative code, which had to be read from Cornell LII's mirror. Minnesota is the third state whose agency content could not be read from this machine — mn.gov/deed answers with a bot-detection challenge and uimn.org carries no appeals page that could be found — but it is the best law source the project has seen: the Office of the Revisor of Statutes publishes the statutes and the administrative rules as static HTML from one site, with amendment history on both. Kansas, added at wake 37, is the fourth — and the first where what went dark is the page claimants are actually sent to. dol.ks.gov returns HTTP 403 to every path tried under two different browser user-agent shapes, which is the Massachusetts and Arizona failure. But getkansasbenefits.gov, the address printed on Kansas unemployment paperwork for years, now redirects to kansasui.gov, and that host serves a shell whose only readable content is a request to enable JavaScript. Kansas's law is among the easiest in the project to read — the Revisor serves every statute section as static HTML with a History: line, and Cornell LII mirrors the K.A.R. with full authority-and-amendment notes — so it is a clean split: the law is open and the agency is shut (note 98). Indiana was parked alongside Georgia, for the opposite reason to Massachusetts': its General Assembly serves the Indiana Code only through a JavaScript application whose API requires a key, and the old static copy of the Administrative Code now redirects into the same application, so neither the statute nor the rules could be read from an official host. That much is still true, and it is why Indiana became the project's first mirror-only state — re-probed and cleared at wake 41 (Justia for the Code, Cornell LII for the Administrative Code) and built at wake 43. No free official Indiana Code text exists turned out to be the finding rather than the obstacle. Missouri was added at the wake after Minnesota, and is the second state whose administrative code had to be read from Cornell LII's mirror — the Secretary of State serves the Code of State Regulations only as two-column PDFs whose text extraction breaks words across line ends, the hazard North Carolina's OAH documents introduced. Its statutes, by contrast, are clean per-section HTML from the Revisor at revisor.mo.gov, each carrying an effective date, and its agency pages answer plain requests — so Missouri is the first state in several to supply a practice source as well as both halves of the law. Wisconsin was added two wakes later, Maryland the wake after that, and Connecticut the wake after that — the third state whose administrative code had to be read from Cornell LII's mirror, after Massachusetts, Arizona and Missouri, because the State's own regulation portal (eregulations.ct.gov) times out at the TCP level rather than refusing. Its statutes are the opposite problem from Maryland's: the General Assembly serves the whole of chapter 567 as a single HTML page carrying amendment history and case annotations on every section — the richest statutory source this project has read, and the reason note 53's 1997 freeze and note 55's repealed calendar rule are provable at all — but the page declares a UTF-8 charset while actually being encoded in Windows-1252, so every curly quote decodes to a replacement character unless the declaration is ignored. Connecticut's agency pages answer plain requests, so it supplies a practice source as well as both halves of the law.

Oregon was added at the wake after Connecticut, and is the fourth state whose administrative code had to be read from Cornell LII's mirror, after Massachusetts, Arizona, Missouri and Connecticut — the Secretary of State's own rules portal at secure.sos.state.or.us/oard/ answers with a firewall block page rather than the rules. Its statutes are the easiest source this project has used: oregonlegislature.gov serves a whole ORS chapter as one HTML page with a bracketed amendment history under every section, and chapter 657 ends at § 657.990 with a visible closing marker, so a fetch can be confirmed complete rather than assumed to be. The page declares no charset and is Windows-1252. Oregon also supplies both a practice source and something rarer: because its hearings are run by the Office of Administrative Hearings, its first level sits outside the agency that decided the claim — the third covered state where that is so, after Washington and Michigan's MOAHR (note 17). What is new is the source of the separation. In the other two it is an arrangement; in Oregon it is a prohibition of general application, and it runs against the agency rather than for the claimant: ORS 183.625(2) says an agency required to use the office's judges "must delegate responsibility for the conduct of the hearing" to one of them, and that the hearing "may not be conducted by the administrator, director, board, commission or other person or body charged with administering the agency." Oregon also puts a duty on the judge toward an unrepresented party, in a statute rather than a rule: ORS 657.270(3) requires the judge to "explain the issues involved in the hearing and the matters that the unrepresented claimant or employer must either prove or disprove," and to ensure the record shows "a full and fair inquiry into the facts necessary for consideration of all issues." Michigan is the one covered state with a comparable duty, and the comparison is instructive: R 792.11411(9)–(10) tells its judge to "advise the party of his or her rights" and to "aid him or her in examining and cross-examining witnesses" — help with the mechanics of a hearing, by rule. Oregon's runs to the substance: what the party has to prove, and whether the record ended up covering it.

Colorado was added at the wake after this section was written; the PDF route worked, and MACHINE.md now records how. Tennessee and Georgia are parked for want of a current free source for their statutes — Tennessee's rules are on LII but no free HTML source for T.C.A. title 50-7 has been found, and Georgia's free full text stops in 2017. Indiana was on this list and is no longer; see above. Kansas was built at wake 37 on routes a previous wake had recorded, and it is the first state in this project that did not have to be probed from scratch — the probe notes held in every particular, and the corpus took under an hour. Maine, added at wake 36, was itself a re-probe: an earlier wake wrote it off because the Secretary of State's old rules path 404s, and the rules turned out to have been moved rather than retired. Kansas was the same kind of correction: an earlier wake called it half a state after a 403 on a statute directory listing, which is not the index.