Paid Family Leave: Which States Have It and What It Costs

The first time I had to answer this properly, I had one employee in Washington and one in a state with no program at all. I assumed the obligations would be roughly similar. They were not close, and the gap was not a rounding error: one of them generated a quarterly filing, a payroll deduction and a mandatory notice, and the other generated nothing.

Paid family leave in the United States is not a national benefit. It is a set of separate state insurance programs, each with its own contribution rate, its own funding split, its own wage replacement formula and its own maximum duration. An employer with people in three states can be running three different systems, and an employer in Texas or Florida can be running none.

This page is the map. It lists every state that has enacted a program, what each takes out of payroll and who pays it, how much of a wage it replaces and for how long. Then it answers the question that applies to more employers than any other: what you owe when your state has no program. I build leave records and document workflows into FirstHR for businesses without a dedicated HR person. State programs change every year, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice and confirm the current figures for the states you actually employ in.

What These Programs Are

A state paid family leave program is social insurance, not an employer benefit. Employees, employers or both pay a payroll contribution into a state fund, and the state pays a percentage of an employee’s wages while they are out on qualifying leave. The employer does not write the benefit check.

That structure has three consequences worth holding onto. Your direct payroll cost is a contribution percentage, not a salary continuation. Your administrative cost is registration, withholding, quarterly reporting and employee notices. And your exposure during an actual leave is coverage, not payroll, because the state is paying.

That last figure is the one that puts the rest in perspective. Paid family leave was available to 27 percent of private industry workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employee Benefits in the United States survey for March 2023, the most recent vintage in which the survey published the measure. Most American workers are covered by neither a state program nor an employer policy.

Every State Program in One Table

Here is every state with an enacted mandatory program, with the 2026 contribution rate, who pays it, the wage replacement formula and the maximum duration. Rates and caps are set annually by each state’s program agency, so verify before you build a budget on them.

Three patterns fall out of that table immediately. Twelve weeks is the common family leave entitlement, with California and Rhode Island as the eight-week outliers. Wage replacement is almost always progressive, replacing a high share of low wages and a much lower share above a threshold. And every program caps the weekly benefit, which means a senior employee on leave is receiving a fraction of their normal pay no matter how generous the headline percentage looks.

The contribution caps matter as much as the rates. New Jersey applies its 0.23 percent to the first $171,100 of wages, Rhode Island stops at $100,000, and Washington, Oregon and Delaware all cap at the Social Security taxable wage base, which is $184,500 for 2026, with Minnesota rounding that ceiling to $185,000. California is the exception that catches people out: since 2024 there is no wage ceiling at all on its disability contribution, so the 1.3 percent applies to every dollar. On a high-salary payroll that is a real number, even though employees carry it rather than the business.

Who Pays and What It Costs

Funding splits into three models, and which one you are in decides whether a state program is a payroll cost or only a paperwork cost. Five states put the whole contribution on employees, nine share it, and the District of Columbia puts all of it on the employer.

Put actual money against that and the differences get concrete. On a million dollars of covered payroll, the employer share is zero in California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. In Washington it is about $3,200, because the employer pays 28.57 percent of the 1.13 percent premium. In Oregon and Delaware the employer minimum is 0.4 percent, so about $4,000. Colorado and Minnesota land around $4,400, Massachusetts around $4,200 on the medical portion, Maine around $5,000, and the District of Columbia at $7,500.

Those are ceilings on a simplified payroll rather than forecasts, since wage caps pull the effective rate down wherever salaries run above the contribution base. Still, the spread is the point: the same headcount can cost nothing in one state and the better part of a junior salary’s worth of contributions in another. This sits inside your broader benefits cost per employee rather than alongside it, and it belongs in the same budget line as your other payroll tax obligations.

One more cost hides in plain sight. Every program has a notice requirement, a registration step and a quarterly wage report, and in several states the employer must also tell employees about the deduction before it starts appearing on their pay stub. Missing the notice is the most common first violation, and it is entirely avoidable.

Where Small Employers Get a Break

Most states relieve the smallest businesses of the employer contribution while keeping them inside the program. That distinction is the one to hold onto: the break is almost always on the money, not on the coverage or the paperwork.

Read that table as a warning as much as a relief. In eight of those nine states, a business with one employee is still inside the program: registered, withholding, filing quarterly and posting notices once collection starts. The employee is fully covered and can claim benefits from day one of eligibility. What the exemption removes is a line item, not a system.

Delaware is the genuine outlier. Its smallest employers sit outside the program altogether, and a tier above that owes only the parental leave module rather than the medical and caregiving ones. Growth across those thresholds triggers new duties, which is why headcount changes are worth tracking deliberately rather than noticing at year end.

Colorado makes the same point from the other direction. Its own FAMLI division is explicit that businesses below the threshold pay no employer premium but must still withhold employee contributions and send them in with wage data every quarter, and their employees keep full access to benefits. That is the shape of nearly every small business exemption in this area.

Enacted but Not Paying Yet

Two states have laws on the books that are not yet moving money. Maryland and Virginia both have firm statutory dates, and both are far enough out that employers there have real planning time rather than a compliance emergency.

Maryland has moved its dates more than once, which is a useful lesson about this whole category. Enacted is not the same as live, and a program can slip by a year while employers are already budgeting for it. Do not withhold anything until the state says to, and do not assume a published date is final until contributions actually start.

Virginia is worth watching for a different reason. It is the first program in the South, it will replace 80 percent of an employee’s average weekly wage up to a cap set at the statewide average, and its employer share falls only on businesses above the smallest tier. If it holds, the argument that paid leave is a coastal-state phenomenon stops being true.

States With No Program

In most of the country there is no state paid family leave, and an employer there owes unpaid leave at most. Florida, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin and the rest have no mandatory program, no contribution and no state benefit. Nothing requires you to pay an employee during family leave in any of them.

The federal layer is the one people misread. The FMLA provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period, and the entitlement itself is written into 29 U.S.C. 2612. It applies to employers with 50 or more employees within 75 miles, for employees who have been there a year and worked at least 1,250 hours. A business below that threshold has no federal leave duty whatsoever, which surprises owners who assumed twelve weeks was a national floor.

What the FMLA does require of covered employers is worth stating precisely, because it is where the real cost sits. The job, or an equivalent one, has to be there at the end. Group health coverage continues on the same terms throughout the absence, with the employer share still being paid. And the leave has to be designated properly, which means paperwork within fixed deadlines rather than an informal understanding. Our guides on the broader leave of absence mechanics and the full list of leave types go deeper on the administration.

Some states without a paid leave program still have their own unpaid family leave statute with a lower coverage threshold than the federal one, and many have paid sick leave laws that cover short absences but not a twelve-week bonding leave. Those are separate obligations that survive the absence of a paid family leave program, and they catch employers who checked only one box.

State Disability Is a Different Thing

A short list of states requires temporary disability insurance, which pays an employee during their own non-work medical condition, including recovery from childbirth. It is not family leave. It does nothing for bonding with a healthy baby, nothing for caring for a sick parent, and nothing for a partner who did not give birth.

California, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island run disability coverage alongside their paid family leave programs, so employees there move from one benefit to the other during a pregnancy leave. Hawaii is the only state with mandatory temporary disability coverage and no paid family leave program at all. Its rules put the obligation on the employer to provide coverage, allow the employer to deduct up to half the premium cost subject to a statutory ceiling on the employee share, and pay benefits for a limited number of weeks per disability period.

The practical implication for an employer in a state with neither is that short-term disability is a voluntary product you can buy rather than a mandate you must satisfy. It is also the cheapest way to make a maternity leave partially paid without committing to a full salary continuation policy, which is why so many small employers reach for it first. The mechanics of how it interacts with unpaid leave are covered in our guide on short term disability and FMLA.

Building a Voluntary Policy

If you are in a no-program state, your policy is the entire benefit, and writing one is a series of five decisions rather than a legal exercise. The federal tax code now leans on this: the Section 45S employer credit for paid family and medical leave was made permanent and expanded starting in 2026, and it runs from 12.5 percent to 25 percent of wages paid to a qualifying employee on leave, per Treasury and Internal Revenue Service guidance issued in August 2026.

The tax credit is the part small employers most often miss. If you are already paying for leave in a state with no program, you may be leaving a general business credit unclaimed on wages you are spending anyway, which changes the arithmetic of a two-week or four-week policy considerably. That is a conversation for your accountant with your actual numbers in front of them.

Two states offer a middle path. New Hampshire and Vermont run voluntary paid family and medical leave insurance markets rather than mandates, where an employer can buy into a state-arranged plan instead of self-funding a policy or doing nothing. It is a genuinely different model, and it is worth a look if you are in either state and want a paid benefit without designing one from scratch.

Payroll Across Several Programs

Coverage follows where the employee works, not where the company is registered. A remote employee living in Washington creates a Washington obligation for a company headquartered in Texas, and no amount of head office policy changes that.

That single rule generates most of the multi-state administration. Each program requires separate registration with its state agency, separate withholding at that state’s rate, separate quarterly wage reporting, and its own employee notices in its own timing. The rates change annually and rarely in step, so a January payroll update is not optional. Several states also require a specific written notice to the employee before the first deduction appears.

Private plan exemptions are the main option available for simplifying this. Most program states let an employer run an approved private or equivalent plan instead of the state plan, provided the benefits are at least as generous and employees pay no more than they would under the state scheme. That can consolidate administration across several states with one carrier, though it moves claims handling onto you or your broker.

The rest is record keeping, and it is where small teams lose the most time. Knowing who is on leave, under which program, with what job protection running in parallel, and when they are due back is exactly the sort of thing that decays in a spreadsheet. Keeping leave and absence records in the same place as employee profiles is the difference between answering a state audit in an hour and reconstructing a year of absences from email.

Where Employers Get This Wrong

Five patterns account for most of the trouble, and the first is the most expensive.

Assuming company size exempts you from a state program is first. It almost never does. Size affects the employer contribution in several states and the entire obligation in essentially one, but employees are covered either way and the withholding duty survives.

Treating a state benefit as job protection is second. In several states the program pays wages without guaranteeing the job, and protection comes from the FMLA or a separate state statute. Assuming the two travel together produces a reinstatement dispute at exactly the wrong moment.

Failing to run FMLA concurrently is third. If a covered employee draws state benefits during an absence you never designated as FMLA, you may have handed them a fresh twelve-week entitlement afterwards. The designation paperwork is dull and it is the whole defense.

Missing the employee notice is fourth. Most programs require notice before the first deduction and a posted notice thereafter, and these are the violations state agencies find first because they are trivially verifiable.

Writing a policy that only covers birth mothers is fifth. It is the most common drafting error in voluntary policies, and it converts a benefit meant to attract people into a discrimination claim waiting for a father or an adoptive parent to ask the obvious question. See our guide on paternity leave requirements for the detail, and the state-by-state maternity leave guide if pregnancy leave specifically is what you are working on.

Frequently Asked Questions