When a winter crew separates in April, a share of them will file. Those claims get charged to your account, the charges feed your experience rating, and the rating sets what you pay per employee next January. That chain is the whole story, and the two places operators lose money on it are the same two places every year: not applying for a seasonal designation in the handful of states that offer one, and not responding properly to the claims themselves.
The second one costs more than the first, and almost nobody writes about it.
Your rate is a formula, and benefit charges are the input you control
Federal law requires that any reduced state unemployment tax rate be based on the employer's own experience with unemployment over at least three consecutive years. That's FUTA section 3303(a)(1), and it's why every state's system, whatever it's called locally, ends up measuring benefits charged against payroll.
The two states most relevant to Rocky Mountain seasonal operators run different versions of the same idea.
Colorado computes a "percent of excess": premiums paid over the life of the account, minus benefits charged, divided by average annual chargeable payroll for the previous three state fiscal years. A higher percent of excess earns a lower rate, per CDLE. Which rate schedule everyone sits on is set separately by the trust fund's reserve ratio. For 2026, the chargeable wage base rose to $30,600 from $27,200, and because the 2025 reserve ratio came in at 0.649%, below the 0.7% threshold, the solvency surcharge stays in effect on top of everyone's computed rate.
Wyoming assigns employers with at least three years of history a base rate derived from their own benefit ratio, then adds a set of adjustment factors on top, under W.S. 27-3 Article 5. Employers with less than three years get an industry-based rate instead, which is why a new operation's first rate says nothing about its own claims history and its fourth one says everything. The 2026 taxable wage base is $33,800, up from $32,400.
Translate that into money you can feel. One percentage point of rate movement is $338 per Wyoming employee who earns at or above the wage base, and $306 per Colorado employee. Short-season staff often earn less than the base, so their per-head figure runs lower. On a roster of two or three hundred it still lands in five figures, every year, on a number nobody in the building thinks of as controllable.
Colorado also permits voluntary premium payments, which can shift your percent of excess and lower your assigned rate for a calendar year. They are not prepayments and they are not refundable, so the math has to pencil before you send one.
Seasonal employer designation exists in some states, and probably not in yours
A minority of states let an employer apply for formal seasonal status, which can block former staff from drawing benefits between seasons on wages earned during the season. The state lists circulating on payroll blogs are years out of date and disagree with each other, so treat them as a starting point only. As NELP's overview of seasonal provisions notes, most states have nothing on the books beyond what federal law requires, and seasonal employees draw benefits on the same basis as anyone else.
The practical test is simple. States that offer it publish an application and a deadline. If your state agency has no such form, that is your answer, and your effort belongs in the next section instead.
Two states worth studying, because they show what the designation actually demands:
Colorado treats a business, or specific occupations within a business, as seasonal when the work runs less than 26 weeks in a calendar year, there are at least 45 consecutive days when nobody works in that occupation, and no more than 25% of the workers in each seasonal occupation work outside the season. Applications go through MyUI Employer+ and must be renewed annually. Occupation titles have to be functionally distinct and specific; CDLE's own example of an acceptable title is "Ski Instructor," and its example of an unacceptable one is "winter operator." You must post a Notice of Application for Seasonal Status and attest to the posting within 10 calendar days, or the application is denied and you start over.
Michigan allows designation for employers that regularly operate no more than 26 weeks in a 52-week period, excluding construction. The application must reach the state at least 20 days before the season begins, you post a copy where all workers can see it, and each worker gets written notice at hire that they are seasonal and may be denied benefits between seasons. Per the state's Fact Sheet 165, a worker who did not receive that written notice will not be denied benefits, and neither will a worker whose employer failed to post the notice.
The pattern across both: the paperwork is trivial, the deadlines are pre-season and unforgiving, and the notice requirements exist to protect the worker. Miss the posting and you have the designation on paper and none of the benefit in practice. Whether your operation meets the underlying tests, particularly if you run both a winter and a summer season, is a question for your state agency or counsel before you file.
The lever most operators leave on the table
States penalize employers who don't respond to claim notices properly, and the penalty is usually the loss of charge relief you would otherwise have received. Colorado calls it a Pattern of Failing to Respond, defined at C.R.S. 8-79-102(5)(a) as repeated, documented failure to respond timely or adequately to Division requests, judged on the number of failures against total volume. Employers with that pattern get a Prohibition Non-Charging decision each January, and they lose relief from charges they would otherwise have avoided. The rule applies the same way if a third-party administrator handles your claims, which surprises operators who assumed they had outsourced the risk.
Two words in that definition do the damage. Timely is the one everyone tracks. Adequately is the one that gets missed: a response that says "seasonal layoff" and nothing else is a response, and it is frequently not an adequate one. If the separation was a quit, a discharge for misconduct, or a refusal of continuing work, the response needs the facts and dates that support it. A response that can't be adjudicated is treated like no response at all.
For a seasonal operation this compounds fast, because your claims don't arrive one at a time. They arrive in a wave in the two weeks after closing day, usually when your HR person has just been cut to part time. That is precisely the volume and timing that generates a pattern.
Three things worth doing before your season ends:
- Decide now who owns claim responses in the four weeks after closing, and make sure that person is still on payroll then.
- Register for SIDES E-Response with your state so notices arrive electronically and get logged rather than sitting in a mailbox at a closed base area.
- Write the separation reason at the time of separation, in the file, with dates. Reconstructing it six weeks later is how inadequate responses happen.
Also worth checking: whether your state offers a work-sharing program as an alternative to a layoff during a slow shoulder. Colorado runs Work Share and Wyoming runs Short Time Compensation. Neither fits a full seasonal shutdown, but both can fit a shoulder-season hour reduction.
What a seasonal designation costs you on the recruiting side
Here is the part the payroll vendors leave out. A seasonal designation, where it exists, works by denying benefits to your workers between seasons, usually conditioned on giving them reasonable assurance of similar work next season. That is real money out of a lift op's pocket during the exact eight weeks they have no income.
It also isn't fully in your control. The state, not the employer, determines whether reasonable assurance was given and whether the denial applies. Give a worker assurance of a job next season and then fail to provide it, and you can end up with the claim anyway plus a worker who tells everyone in town.
Weigh that against what you're trying to buy. If your return rate matters more than a fraction of a point on your rate, and in a market where housing already makes seasonal work marginal, it often does, then the designation may cost you more in recruiting than it saves in premiums. Operators who compete on being the place people come back to sometimes decide not to file at all. That is a legitimate answer, and it should be a deliberate one rather than a missed deadline.
Before closing day
Pull your last two years of benefit charge statements, count how many separations generated a charge you could have contested, and check whether any of your responses were logged late or incomplete. That number, multiplied by your wage base, is the real size of the opportunity. Then check whether your state has a seasonal designation and what its pre-season deadline is, because that one is a calendar problem, not a judgment call.
If you're rebuilding a crew for next season, you can list open roles on TurnSeasons and see what other operators in your town are posting, including which ones pair the job with housing. The workers reading those listings are running their own math on the off-season, which is worth knowing before you decide how to handle yours.