There is a deepening ‘digital turn’ in welfare administration. While the pace of this turn varies across countries and domains, citizens are increasingly doing welfare-by-themselves; applying for benefits and accessing services through interfaces that shift the burden of administrative work from states to citizens. Digital self-servicing is promoted as making services fairer and easier to access. However, it generates new sources of administrative burden through intensifying the learning and compliance tasks associated with accessing welfare. In this paper we examine how digital self-servicing affects service-users’ experiences of administrative burden in the context of the automation of government welfare-to-work services. The study draws on interviews with 52 jobseekers self-managing their activation through an online platform. While many experienced self-activation as reducing the temporal and psychological costs of welfare-to-work, we show that the system architecture locks jobseekers into narrow ways of fulfilling key tasks. It also unintendedly motivated patterns of performative job-searching where claimants expended additional time and effort on meaningless online applications because activities they were already undertaking were invisible to the interface. Self-servicing also generated additional learning demands to understand how to navigate the portal and welfare rules. Our study suggests that individual’s often try to avoid these learning activities. While this saves time and effort in the short-term, it increases their risk of incurring future financial and psychological costs pointing to trade-offs in the administrative burden of self-servicing.
