How do I know if I’ve been paid correctly?

Great question! Cocoon estimates your benefits using our own benefit calculator. While our estimates are typically accurate, it’s always good to double check the numbers in case your leave plan has changed along the way.

From your Cocoon Dashboard, click the Your payments to see details about your pay from various sources across pay periods. From there, you can click “How do I know if I've been paid correctly?” as shown in the screenshot below.

This will bring you to our Benefits Verification Tool.

What do I need to verify a payment?

When verifying your payments, you’ll need to gather information from the pay stub that came as an Explanation of Benefits (EOB).

For some entities, like Washington state benefits that are only distributed via debit card, this might only be available through your portal. For others, like the California EDD, they might vary depending on the claim type. For example, the EDD disability payments are available in your portal, but EDD Paid Family Leave (PFL) benefits are only available on the paper EOB.

The information we need to verify state payments includes:

Gross amount
- This might be different than the check amount
Payment coverage dates
- These are the dates for which you're being paid and should be a date range

For private insurance payments, we need:

Gross amount
FICA deductions for Medicare and Social Security
Other deductions
- "Other" deductions are usually to account for expected state benefits so this is typically a large number
Payment coverage dates

How do I read the Explanation of Benefits (EOB)?

State and private insurance EOBs vary a lot from one to the next. Here are some examples on how to read a typical EOB. If you’re having trouble reading your EOB and don’t see an example here, please reach out to [email protected].

When inputting private disability benefits, if the gross and net payment are the same, then enter 0 for FICA deductions. Leaving the deductions blank may block you from submitting the details.

State Benefit Examples

California EDD

New York State Insurance Fund (NYSIF)

Please note that most NY benefits are distributed via the private insurance provider through your employer; you'll want to look at the Private Benefit Examples for those. There is a NY specific Guardian example following this NYSIF.

New York (via Guardian, but may come from a different private insurance)

Rhode Island

Nuance: the exact date range is not listed. An easier way to check this benefit could be selecting one 7-day week and using the weekly rate to verify benefit payments.