Starting your own business can sometimes be challenging and you might find yourself in a situation where, after a few months of self-employment, your business is not going as well as you had hoped. In such a situation, you might still be entitled to an unemployment benefit. However, this will depend on the following factors:
If you resigned from your job or are in way responsible for being out of work, you will generally not be entitled to an unemployment benefit.
You might be in a position where your unemployment benefit ended because your assumed income (‘fictief inkomen’) was higher than 87.5% of your average monthly unemployment benefit income (‘WW-maandloon’). If this applies to you and you have since completely shut down your business, you might be entitled to receive an unemployment benefit again.
Keep in mind that you can only reclaim your unemployment benefit if you apply within the required time frame:
In both cases, the period to apply begins from the moment you started working as a self-employed person.
It might be that you were self-employed at the same time as you had a job. If you lose your job, you could be entitled to receive an unemployment benefit based on the number of hours you were in paid employment.
If you would like more information about self-employment and the unemployment benefit, you can contact us via the UWV employee helpline.