If you have an active claim, the place to follow it online is now UIF Online at uifonline.labour.gov.za, not uFiling. The Department of Employment and Labour launched UIF Online for employee claims on 1 April 2025 and closed the old uFiling employee claims portal on 20 May 2026. The uFiling site itself now tells claimants that benefit claims are no longer processed there, so old guides that walk you through a uFiling “dashboard” no longer apply to workers.
One reassurance before you start: claims lodged on uFiling before it closed were kept in a separate database and are being migrated. The Minister insisted in late May 2026 that every one of those claims was accounted for, so an older claim should still be traceable.
Getting into your UIF Online profile
The UIF Online home page offers three options: Home, Register and Login. If you registered when you lodged your claim, choose Login and use the details you set up. To register in the first place you need either a UIF reference number or a CK number; a forgotten password is recovered with your ID number. If the portal won’t let you in, or you’ve forgotten your password, our UIF online login help deals with that separately so this page can stay on what you see once you’re inside.
Where claim progress and payments sit
The Department hasn’t published an official screen-by-screen manual for UIF Online, and screen names can change between versions (the portal read “V3.03” in October 2026). What it does confirm is that the portal lets you apply for benefits, track your claim in real time and submit enquiries. In practice that means three areas to look for after logging in:
- The claims area, reached through the option to claim UIF. Each application you have lodged should be listed with its benefit type and current status.
- The claim’s own detail view. Open a claim to see its progress and any request for outstanding documents.
- The enquiries option, for questions about that claim without phoning.
A status is a single word or phrase, and the same words appear across channels. Rather than repeat them here, use our guide to what each UIF claim status means once you have found yours.
Reading payment entries against your bank statement
UIF payments arrive in instalments, not as one lump sum. For unemployment benefits each instalment follows a continuation request, which you confirm roughly every four weeks; maternity, illness and adoption claims have their own monthly continuation forms. So every payment you see should line up with a period you confirmed. When you check your history, compare each entry with your bank statement and ask three questions:
- Does every period I confirmed have a matching payment, or is one missing?
- Is the amount similar from one period to the next? A drop after about 238 paid days is expected for unemployment claims, because the rate falls after that point.
- Has anything been shown as approved for payment but not reached the bank yet?
If a payment shows as approved but isn’t in your account, follow our steps for tracing a UIF payment that has not arrived. If the claim itself is missing from your profile, or the status hasn’t moved for weeks, see fixing UIF claims that don’t show online.
Make a habit of noting the date and status each time you log in. A short written record of when a claim moved, and when it didn’t, makes any later enquiry to the UIF much quicker to resolve.