Family Leave California: Paid Family Leave Benefits, Eligibility, and Updates for 2025

California’s Paid Family Leave program provides up to eight weeks of partial wage coverage for caregiving and bonding with children. Eligibility criteria and compensation limits have changed for 2025, administered through the State Disability Insurance (SDI) system.

By Brad Nakase, Attorney

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. History

3. Provisions

4. Awareness & usage patterns

5. Impact

Introduction

Established in 2002, family leave in California is governed by the state’s PFL (Paid Family Leave) insurance scheme, also referred to as the FTDI (Family Temporary Disability Insurance) program, provides unemployment disability benefits to people who utilize time off regular work to take care for a critically ill family member or form an attachment with a newly born minor child.

Benefit payments may be made to you for a maximum of eight weeks if you are qualified. Approximately 70–90% of the weekly salary earned five to eighteen months prior to the start date of your claim will be paid. Debit cards or checks will be used to pay you. Benefits have a weekly cap and can last up to 6 weeks, or around 70% of wages.

Benefits under family leave in California began on 1^st July 2004. The Employment Development Department’s State Disability Insurance (SDI) program administers the Paid Family Leave plan. Like the SDI scheme, the PFL insurance scheme is entirely supported by employee payments.

According to the law, PFL must be utilized in conjunction with leave under the CFRA (California Family Rights Act) and the federal FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act), which both offer 12 weeks of unpaid time off over a duration of twelve months. In simple terms, PFL provides remuneration for a maximum of 8 weeks of parental leave, while the FMLA & CFRA provide safeguards for employment for up to 12 weeks.

History

California became the first state to enact legislation mandating Paid Family leave in California in 2002, following a protracted effort by the California Labor Federation, California Work & Family Coalition, and the AFL-CIO. Only Washington and New Jersey had enacted legislation granting paid family leave coverage as of the middle of 2008.

The FIRST (Family Income Responding to Significant Transitions) Act, introduced by Lynn Woolsey (Congresswoman), a Californian Democrat, in 2009, five years following California’s paid family leave law was first implemented, would motivate other states to create their respective paid family leave initiatives while also providing federal funding to states that already established paid family leave laws to administer and implement their programs.

Benefit limits were raised in 2025 when SB 951 was passed.

Provisions

Participation in the SDI (State Disability Insurance) Program (or an optional plan in place of SDI) is a requirement to qualify for family leave in California.

Among the program’s benefits are the following:

PFL permits a maximum of 6 weeks of paid leave over a single 12-month period.

Workers who use time off to spend time with their very own children, the children of their recognized domestic partners, or children placed for foster care or adoption with them or their living partners are covered by PFL. The minor’s eligibility ends a year after the birth date, adoption, or placement in foster care.

PFL additionally covers workers who take time off in order to care for a parent, spouse, domestic partner, or child who is very ill.

1. Exclusions

Benefits from PFL insurance cannot be obtained by an employee who is also qualified for or currently receiving workers’ compensation, unemployment compensation, or government disability insurance.

Before the employee receives PFL benefits for the first time, an employer may mandate that workers use at least two weeks of vacation time that has been earned but not used.

2. Job security

There are no requirements for job security in the PFL. It instead depends on the minimal job security currently provided by state and federal laws: a company is only obligated to offer time off and retain a worker if they are protected by the CFRA (California Family Rights Act) or the FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act). Employees of companies with a staff of twenty or more are entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave under the California Family Rights Act.

3. Benefit rates

Benefit payments under family leave in California can be calculated with the aid of a calculator provided by the Employment Development Department of California.

Benefit amounts are fixed at 70% of low-income workers’ income and 60% of middle- & high-income earners’ income; however, the highest possible weekly benefit is linked to the state’s Average Weekly Wage for the claim year. This upper limit is $1252 for 2019, and the lowest weekly benefit range is $50.

A person must earn a minimum of $300 (or $75 each quarter) throughout the initial time frame, which spans 12 months and is split into 4 quarters of 3 months each, in order to be eligible for the weekly minimum amount of fifty dollars.

Awareness & usage patterns

Despite its early adoption, family leave in California has suffered from low public awareness. Just 138,000 individuals requested benefits in the initial year after the program’s enactment. This was under fifty percent of the 300,000 benefit claimants that California estimated. Care for a sick family member accounted for 12% of the claims while connecting with a new kid accounted for 88%.

Eighty-three percent of new kid claims and seventy percent of care claims were made by women. The program’s relatively insignificant status may have contributed to the small number of claims, but the program’s inadequate rewards might also have played a role.

Parents of children with chronic illnesses in California & Illinois who participated in a study before and after the implementation of PFL did not differ in the amount of time they took off from work to care for a newborn or sick kid. Just 5% of the parents polled had actually used the program, and just 18% were aware of it.

89% of companies reported either no discernible effect or a good effect from the initiative, according to a study of 253 companies and 500 workers. Larger employers were more likely to have a positive opinion of the program than smaller employers, probably because they have a greater likelihood of already offering paid family leave. Employers who worked with PFL to coordinate their individual sick leave claimed cost savings of 60%.

According to a 2007 survey, just 28.1% of residents in California knew of the PFL initiative.

Impact

A study conducted in 2019 discovered that the program for Paid Family Leave in California increased “the likelihood of nursing for a minimum of six months by 5% points, and the total length of nursing by roughly 18 days.”

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