What I mean is that even in an at-will state, employees have an expectation of continued employment, unless their employer has given them a defined end date. A

What I mean is that even in an at-will state, employees have an expectation of continued employment, unless their employer has given them a defined end date. An employer can decide to fire an employee at any point without cause or notice, but until that happens, the employee has an expectation that they're going to be coming in to work and doing their job. To put it another way: Even in at-will states, you're employed until you aren't. But if an employer fires an employee, that upends the arrangement, whether or not the employee was planning to stop working at future date, and whether or not the employee has given the employer notice of that fact. Frankly, the only reason it's considered common practice to give notice is because there is an implicit expectation that you will continue to be employed until your date of planned separation and can make arrangements based on that fact. If employers regularly fired anyone who gave notice, and offered them no severance, no one would give notice. So, for the purposes of qualifying for unemployment benefits, it should not matter whether you had planned to stop working for your employer on some future date. The firing has nullified those plans. The employer has prevented you from working until the date on which you intended to stop working, and so it's almost nonsensical to say, "Well, now you're out of a job, but let's treat you as if you still have a job that you're still planning to quit on the date you specified."