NY’s paid family leave to include care for siblings starting in 2023

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New York’s paid family leave will be extended to include care for siblings starting in 2023, but other provisions of the law are essentially unchanged.

Gov. Kathy Hochul recently signed into law the provision that allows employees to take paid leave to care for siblings. The current law covers only care for spouses, domestic partners, children and step-children, parents, grandparents and grandchildren with serious health conditions.

“Taking care of your family is a basic human right, no one should have to choose between caring for a loved one and a paycheck,” Hochul said in a news release. “Fighting to expand paid family leave is personal to me and so many others, and I am proud to work with advocates and legislators to make sure that New Yorkers can now take care of their siblings without fear of losing their jobs or income.”

New York’s original paid family leave legislation was enacted in 2016 and has been in effect since 2018.

“It has worked surprisingly smoothly in my view,” said Luke Wright, partner in the labor and employment practice at Harter Secrest & Emery LLP.

The program is an employee-paid insurance that provides workers with job-protected, paid time off to bond with a newborn, adopted or fostered child; care for a family member with a serious health condition (including severe cases of COVID-19), or assist loved ones when a member of the family is deployed abroad on active military service.

The law has also covered some situations during the COVID-19 pandemic when an employee or their minor, dependent child has been under a quarantine order.

Eligible workers may take up to 12 weeks off in a floating calendar year and receive 67 percent of their pay to care for family members.

To be eligible, full-time employees must work more than 20 hours a week and have been with a company at least 26 weeks, or part-time employees working fewer than 20 hours a week must have worked 175 hours for that company. The clock on eligibility restarts if an employee moves to another company.

The insurance is funded wholly by all workers, who pay a 0.511 percent payroll tax up to a maximum annual contribution of $423.71 in 2022.

“New York’s Paid Family Leave has been a model across our nation when it comes to helping working families, and I commend Governor Hoch

Under the extension of the law, siblings will be defined as biological siblings, adopted siblings, step-siblings and half-siblings. These family members can live outside of New York state, and even outside of the country.

“Before, an employee may have gone to his employer and said, ‘My brother’s really sick, I need to take care of him,’ but there was no law that allowed for that,” Wright said. “But sometimes a sibling is the closest person someone has to take care of them.”

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