This post is the fifth part in a series on Minnesota Paid Leave. Feel free to check out Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. The previous post focused on deadlines and taxes. This post will focus on when the leave can be taken, for how long, and in what forms.
Let’s start with the when. The general rule is intuitive: the option of leave is available to the employee as long as the underlying condition or event exists. For example, an employee can take the leave for surgery, including any recovery treatment or therapy medically necessary. Once the employee has recovered from the surgery, they cannot continue to take paid leave under the program. The one type of leave with a firm deadline is bonding leave (birth, adoption, or foster placement of a child), which must be taken within 12 months of the birth or placement. Another key caveat is that the leave must be at least 7 days long to qualify for paid leave. For example, an employee taking leave for a few days to recover from the flu will not qualify, but an employee hospitalized for 2 weeks with an infection likely will.
Next, how much leave can the employee take? For both medical leave and family leave, it is 12 weeks for each leave type. That 12-week cap applies even if there are several events falling under the same leave type. In other words, if the employee takes leave to bond with their new child and to care for a sick relative, the employee gets 12 weeks total for both family leave events, not 12 weeks for each event. On top of the 12-week totals, the total amount of leave taken in a year cannot exceed 20 weeks. In other words, if an employee takes 12 weeks of medical leave, that means they cannot take more than 8 weeks of family leave in the same year. Finally, a “year” for the purposes of this discussion starts on the effective date of the first leave event. In other words, a request for medical leave in September of one calendar year will be bundled in the same year as another request for medical leave in January a few months later, even though they are happening in separate calendar years.
Finally, does the leave need to be taken continuously? It certainly can be taken continuously, but the law also allows for the leave to be taken intermittently, so long as certain conditions are met. For example, an employee may decide to take family leave continuously for 12 weeks to care for the relative, or the employee can take a few days per week off over a longer period to take care of the relative. The law also allows for the leave from the same event to transition between continuous and intermittent leave. For example, a new parent might want to take continuous parental leave for 4 weeks right after the birth of a child, but might want to follow that with a few weeks of intermittent leave to ease their return to the workplace after a month of continuous parental leave. The law also establishes the cap for intermittent leave at 480 hours (the number of hours for 12 weeks of continuous leave, assuming a 40-hour work week) for an employee in a 12-month period. After that, an employer can require any remaining leave be taken continuously.
To provide some takeaways from today’s post:
1. For employees, it is helpful to plan head and communicate early with employers. As the post points out, The leave will only qualify for only so long and only under certain circumstances, so it is helpful to sort that out ahead of time rather than relying on faulty assumptions.
2. For employers, the overlap of leave types, timing, length, and continuous vs. intermittent leave presents a lot of challenges, as well as opportunities. Getting policies established ahead of time that both comply with the law and keep things operationally manageable should be dividends, rather than leaving you scrambling when that first employee leave request rolls in.
Thanks for reading!