Lost your job — or leaving one

A layoff hands you a stack of paperwork and two competing countdowns. This guide is the triage order.

First: know your two clocks

1. Your coverage end date. Some employers cut coverage on your last day; others carry you to month-end. Ask HR for the exact date in writing — everything else keys off it.
2. Your 60-day window. Losing job coverage is a qualifying life event: you have 60 days from the loss to enroll in a Marketplace plan (or elect COBRA). You can also enroll up to 60 days before a known end date, which is how you avoid any gap at all.

Voluntary quit, fired, laid off — the special enrollment period doesn't care why. Losing coverage is losing coverage.

The COBRA decision, honestly framed

COBRA is your old plan at full freight: employer share plus your share plus 2% — the election packet's number is usually the scariest object in the stack. It buys perfect continuity: same network, same deductible progress. The Marketplace alternative is usually much cheaper — especially because a layoff often cuts your household income into subsidy territory — at the cost of possibly changing networks mid-year.

The decision rule that covers most cases: mid-treatment or deep into a family deductible → price out COBRA seriously; otherwise → the Marketplace probably wins on price. The full worked comparison, including the severance wrinkle below, is in COBRA vs. Marketplace: the real math.

Severance, unemployment, and your subsidy

Your premium tax credit runs on your estimated income for the calendar year — which, in a layoff year, is a weird number: months of salary, plus severance (taxable, counts), plus unemployment benefits (count), plus whatever you earn next. People overestimate their subsidy by forgetting severance and underestimate it by assuming the lost salary "counts" for months it won't exist. Estimate the year as a whole, then update the Marketplace when your next job lands.

Keeping your doctors (and your kid's specialist)

Before enrolling, filter plans by your must-keep providers in the enrollment flow. If a family member is mid-treatment and no acceptable Marketplace network includes their specialist, that's the textbook case for COBRA — and also worth asking carriers about transition-of-care provisions, which sometimes cover an ongoing course of treatment with an out-of-network provider temporarily.

Don't go bare "for a couple months"

The gap always starts as two weeks. If money is the issue, check your real subsidized price first — post-layoff income often qualifies for far more help than people expect, and if your income estimate is low enough, Medicaid (enrollable year-round) may apply. Your actual numbers are one ZIP code away.