Fourteen months ago I went through an overpayment situation where EDD said I had been overpaid because I hadn't correctly reported some wages during a week I did some consulting work. That was the most invasive EDD ever got into my finances, and even then they were only looking at the wages I earned during that specific week of my claim, not my bank account, not my savings, not my investments. The scope of what EDD looks at is very narrow and very specific to your earnings and work status.

Registration at CalJOBS done and resume posted on the second week after I filed, mostly because the letter made it sound urgent and I didn't want to lose payments over it. The whole time I've been doing this, CalJOBS has never asked about my bank account either. Work search history, resume, job applications - that's what they want to see. Financial privacy is completely intact throughout this whole process.

Reopen versus refile — if you get a part-time job while on UI and it ends while your benefit year is still open, you don't file a whole new claim. You reopen the existing one through UI Online. Only if your benefit year has ended do you go through the full application process again. Reopening is faster and uses the same weekly benefit amount from your original claim.

Combined wage claims apply if you worked in California and another state within the last 18 months — you can combine those wages into one claim, but that type of claim has to be filed by phone, fax or mail, not online. Worth knowing if your work history crosses state lines. For someone who only worked in California, even if you've since moved out of state, you file a standard California claim.

DE 8405 notice came about two weeks after my claim started, requiring CalJOBS registration within 21 days. Used Claimyr again when I had a question about whether my professional license registration would count as work search activity — the agent said EDD looks at whether you're genuinely pursuing work, and to certify accurately about what I was doing each week. Getting that answer directly from an agent saved me a lot of guessing about whether my specific situation was okay.

Payments page in UI Online is where things get clearer once your claim is active. Claim History shows the pending or processed status by week, and once a week moves to paid you can see the amount. The dashboard takes some getting used to but those two spots — Payments and Claim History — are the main ones to check regularly.

Eight units down from full-time last semester and my Claim History showed pending for almost two weeks before anything moved. Eventually used Claimyr to get on the line with an EDD agent — my case was flagged for the availability question on top of an identity verification step I hadn't completed. Agent told me the DE 1326C identity verification request had been mailed three weeks earlier and I'd missed it. Got that handled and the pending weeks cleared once both issues were resolved.

Misconception I want to correct from earlier in the thread — someone said no work search contacts are required. That's not quite right, and it's not quite wrong either. EDD doesn't publish a specific number, but the requirement to actively look for work each week you certify is real. You're certifying that you did, under penalty of perjury. 'No specific number' doesn't mean you can certify yes while doing nothing.

Dispatch coordinator laid off after a merger and I had a question about the cap open with EDD for weeks. Tried the phone line constantly and kept getting cut off before anyone answered. Claimyr got me through to a live EDD agent and she confirmed my maximum benefit amount on file matched what my DE 429Z showed — the half-wages cap applied to me, not the 26-week cap, so my total payout was actually about $1,800 less than I'd budgeted for. Would have really messed up my finances if I hadn't found that out when I did.

does the $450 cap ever go up? like does california adjust it for inflation or is it just stuck at $450 forever