If you are hiring and training workers, there is a good chance your state will reimburse a large share of those wages. Most employers have never heard of it. Here is how On-the-Job Training and Incumbent Worker Training grants actually work.
This is the part of the workforce system almost nobody outside it knows about.
You hire someone who needs training. You were going to train them anyway, because that is what hiring is. Under WIOA, the workforce system will reimburse you for a significant share of that person's wages while they come up to speed — on the reasoning that you are absorbing the cost of training someone who was not job-ready, and that is a public good worth paying for.
Employers I work with routinely discover they have been doing the work for years without ever asking to be paid for it.
OJT covers new hires. You bring someone on, you train them in the role, and the workforce board reimburses part of their wage for the training period.
IWT is the one employers are most surprised by. It funds training for staff already on your payroll — upskilling, new certifications, keeping people employed as the job changes underneath them.
Unlike OJT, IWT requires you to share the cost, and your share scales with your size:
You cover a minimum of 10% of the training cost. The smallest employers get the most favorable terms.
Your minimum share rises to 25%.
You cover at least half. Still meaningful on a large training spend.
Your share does not always have to be cash. It can be satisfied through fairly evaluated in-kind contributions, or a mix of both — which matters more than it sounds, because supervisor time and facility use are real costs you are already absorbing.
The employee has to be genuinely employed by you in a normal employment relationship, and generally needs an established employment history of six months or more. Where the training is being used to avert a layoff, that drops to three months in many states.
One of the clearest examples I have worked on was an elder care employer. They were already hiring CNAs and caregivers and training them internally, and had no idea the state would help pay for it. Through OJT and IWT they secured over $75,000 in wage reimbursements — money that went straight back into growing the team.
Nothing about how they hired changed. What changed was that they asked.
These programs are administered locally. The money is federal, the rules are federal, but your route in is the local workforce development board covering your area — the same board that runs the American Job Centers near you.
That is both the good news and the catch. Good, because it is a relationship you can build with real people. The catch is that every board has its own paperwork, its own priorities, its own funding cycles, and its own view of which occupations matter locally. An approach that lands in one region falls flat in the next.
Do not hire first and ask afterward. OJT is built around a contract that is in place before the training starts. Bring someone on, train them for three months, then approach the board, and you have generally missed the window on that hire. The sequence is the whole game.
There is a second angle here. If you operate a trade school, these same employer-side dollars are a reason for local employers to work with you — and a reason for the board to send people your way. That works best when your programs are listed on your state's ETPL, which is what lets students bring WIOA funding to your door in the first place.
What I do is figure out which of these fits your situation, work out which board covers you and what they actually fund, and get the contract in place before the training starts rather than after. Most of the value is in sequencing and in knowing what a given board will say yes to.
If you are hiring, or you are about to put staff through training you were going to pay for anyway, it is worth a conversation before you spend the money.
Tell me what you are doing and where you are. I will tell you whether there is money on the table.
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