California — the bifurcated archetype
California separates the two cleanly. Under Cal. Lab. Code §201, wages of an employee who is discharged are due and payable immediately. Under Cal. Lab. Code §202, wages of an employee who quits are due within 72 hours — unless the employee gave 72 hours' advance notice, in which case the wages are due at the time of quitting.
So if you were fired in California, your employer should hand you your final check on your last day. If you quit without notice, the deadline is 3 days. If you gave 72 hours' notice before quitting, your final check is due on your last day too.
Texas — bifurcated, different timing
Texas Labor Code §61.014 requires final wages to be paid within 6 calendar days for a terminated employee, but only by the next regular payday for an employee who quits. This is a much smaller gap than California, but the bifurcation still matters — a 6-day deadline is much tighter than "next payday" if your payday cycle is bi-weekly.
FLSA-floor states — single rule
Some states (FL, GA, MS, AL, others) don't have their own state final-paycheck statute and defer to FLSA, which itself does not impose a fixed final-paycheck deadline beyond "next regular payday." In those states, both voluntary and involuntary terminations have the same deadline. The decoder asks anyway, because the answer affects downstream branches (waiting-time penalty, PTO payout).
What "voluntary" means
You quit. You resigned. You handed in notice and left. If your employer asked you to leave, that's involuntary, even if the conversation was friendly. If you were laid off (no fault on your part), that's involuntary — same as a discharge for purposes of the final-paycheck deadline. "Constructive discharge" (you quit because the employer made conditions intolerable) is a fact-intensive question and can sometimes flip a quit into an involuntary discharge under wage-and-hour law.
If you're unsure
When in doubt, pick "involuntary" on the decoder — that's usually the shorter deadline, which means your employer's deadline expires sooner and your wage-claim leverage starts sooner. If your real situation is voluntary, the worst that happens is you file a claim a few days early and the employer says "the deadline is actually next Friday." That's recoverable.