What paid family and sick leave does Connecticut require in 2026?

The three Connecticut-applicable leave statutes at a glance

The two state programmes are designed to stack, not overlap. A worker with a cancer diagnosis uses sick leave for the first chemotherapy half-day and PFMLA for the recovery weeks that follow. A new parent uses sick leave for prenatal visits and PFMLA for post-birth bonding.

The trap is shipping a one-page federal-FMLA policy into Connecticut and assuming it covers everything. It does not. Connecticut is one of nine US jurisdictions with both a state sick-leave statute and a state paid-family-leave insurance programme, and it is the only one where the employee carries the full PFMLA cost.

The PA 24-8 coverage phase-in

• 1 January 2025: coverage expanded from 50-plus "service workers" to every employer with 25 or more employees across all occupations.
• 1 January 2026: threshold dropped to 11 or more employees. This is the live threshold for 2026.
• 1 January 2027: threshold drops to every employer regardless of size.

Accrual, cap, carryover

• Accrual rate: 1 hour for every 30 hours worked, starting day one.
• Annual cap: 40 hours per benefit year. Accrual pauses once the employee holds 40.
• Carryover: unused hours carry over year to year, but the balance never exceeds 40.
• Front-loading alternative: grant 40 hours at the start of each benefit year and skip accrual tracking. Cleaner administration for salaried workforces.
• Pay-out at separation: not required. Unused hours are forfeited unless the employer's policy says otherwise.

What Connecticut Paid Sick Leave covers

• Employee's own illness, injury, or health condition
• Diagnosis, treatment, or preventive care for the employee or a family member
• Care for a family member with an illness, injury, or health condition
• Mental health wellness days, including therapy, counselling, or grief-related needs
• Bereavement and funeral arrangements for a deceased family member
• Safe leave related to family violence, sexual assault, or stalking
• Closure of the workplace or a child's school by order of a public official due to a public health emergency

The seasonal-worker carve-out

Workers who put in fewer than 120 days in a calendar year are exempt. The carve-out is narrow. It catches genuine summer-season workers, not regular part-timers. The 120-day test runs by calendar year, not by tenure year.

Written notice and recordkeeping

Every covered employer has to give each worker written notice of their sick-leave rights at hire. Records of hours accrued and used must be retained for three years. Failure to provide the notice is a separate violation from failing to provide the leave, with its own civil penalty.

The five qualifying reasons

• Bonding with a new child by birth, adoption, or placement, within 12 months of arrival
• Family care for a seriously ill family member (Connecticut uses a broad definition covering spouse, domestic partner, child, parent, parent-in-law, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, and any close-association equivalent)
• Own serious health condition, including pregnancy and childbirth recovery, with a 2-week extension for medically certified pregnancy incapacitation
• Military qualifying exigency from a family member's call to active duty
• Safe leave for an employee or family member subject to family violence or sexual assault

Wage replacement: progressive, capped, paid by the state

The formula is progressive. An employee gets 95 percent of base weekly earnings up to 40 times the Connecticut minimum wage ($677.60 a week in 2026), then 60 percent above that floor, up to a cap of 60 times the state minimum ($1,016.40 a week in 2026). The cap was $981.00 in 2025 and rises with each minimum-wage step. The Connecticut Paid Leave Authority resets the figure annually.

Eligibility

An employee qualifies if they earned at least $2,325 in subject earnings during the highest quarter of the base period and are currently employed (or were employed in the previous 12 weeks). Most full-time and substantial part-time workers clear that bar within their first few months on payroll.

How a PFMLA claim runs operationally

The employee files at ctpaidleave.org. Aflac, as third-party administrator, adjudicates and pays the benefit directly into the employee's bank account. The employer confirms wage history and dates of employment but does not approve or deny the claim. Payroll cash flow during a leave is unaffected because the state insurance fund handles the wage replacement.

PFMLA contribution mechanics and the quarterly remittance schedule are also covered on the sibling Connecticut state income tax and unemployment insurance page.

Pre-2025 vs post-2025 framework

What "11 or more employees" actually means in 2026

The 11-employee threshold is counted at the Connecticut-employee level, not global headcount. A 5,000-person multinational with 8 Connecticut hires is not covered in 2026, but the same employer becomes covered on 1 January 2027 when the all-employers rule activates. Headcount is measured by the average number of employees per week during the calendar year.

Mental health and bereavement

An employee can now use accrued sick leave for a therapy appointment, a grief day after a family death, or a counselling session, without characterising it as a physical illness. The change aligns Connecticut with California, Colorado, Illinois, and Maryland on this front. It also reduces the friction of using sick time for absences that previously felt awkward to label.

The written-notice requirement

Every covered employer must give each worker written notice of their sick-leave rights at hire. The notice must cover the accrual rate, the annual cap, the qualifying reasons, the carryover rule, and the prohibition on retaliation. Failure to provide the notice is a separate violation with its own civil penalty.

The four phases of a complicated pregnancy

1. Prenatal appointments (months 1-6): Connecticut Paid Sick Leave covers the routine half-days, the early-trimester nausea, the urgent-care visits. The 40-hour bank is typically enough for an uncomplicated pregnancy and gets tight in the second trimester for an employee with symptoms.
2. Bedrest or hospitalisation before delivery: if a provider certifies the worker as unable to perform job functions, the PFMLA medical-leave clock starts. The 12-week base plus 2-week incapacitation extension creates a 14-week PFMLA ceiling. At a 50-plus-employee employer, federal FMLA runs concurrently with PFMLA for the first 12 of those weeks. (CT FMLA, which covers employers with 1 or more employees since 2022, runs concurrently below that headcount.)
3. Delivery and immediate postpartum recovery: the medical-leave portion of PFMLA continues. Sick leave remains available episode by episode.
4. Bonding leave: PFMLA weeks left after medical recovery are available for bonding within 12 months of the birth. If FMLA exhausted concurrently with PFMLA medical leave, no separate FMLA bonding entitlement remains; the federal clock is one bank, not two.

The maximum-stack scenario

An employer with 80 Connecticut hires. An employee with 18 months of tenure. Certified pregnancy incapacitation. The full 14-week PFMLA extension. Roughly 40 hours of sick leave used across the first two trimesters, then 14 weeks of PFMLA (12 of which run concurrently with FMLA) covering medical and bonding combined. Payroll cash flow during PFMLA is unaffected because the Paid Leave Authority pays the wages.

The threshold map

The CT FMLA overlay (often missed)

Connecticut has its own state-level FMLA statute that overlays the federal one at very different thresholds. Since the 1 January 2022 reform, the state law applies to every employer with 1 or more employees (versus 50-plus within 75 miles under federal law) and uses a 3-consecutive-months service test with no hours requirement (versus 12 months plus 1,250 hours federal). The state entitlement is 12 weeks in a 12-month period, plus up to 2 additional weeks for a serious health condition resulting in incapacitation during pregnancy. CT FMLA runs alongside PFMLA and supplies the job-protection right that PFMLA itself does not embed. The PFMLA pays the wages. The CT FMLA protects the job.

The opt-out cost trade-off

• State plan: 0.5 percent of wages up to the Social Security wage base, capped at $922.50 per employee per year. Funded by the employee. Fixed rate, no underwriting, no claims-experience volatility. Employer cost is administrative only.
• Private plan: underwritten premium based on the employer's demographic and claims profile. A young, healthy workforce can come in below 0.5 percent. An older or higher-claim workforce comes in above it, and the employer typically still cannot exceed the state-plan deduction rate on the employee.
• Administrative load: private plan needs the carrier's claim intake, employer coordination on medical certification and reinstatement, and an annual reapproval filing. State plan needs only quarterly remittance through the employer portal and wage confirmation when a claim is filed.
• Employee-experience risk: employees compare a private-plan claim against the state-plan experience their friends elsewhere are using. Slower or more restrictive adjudication on the private side becomes a recruiting friction.

Annual reapproval discipline

Each year the employer files a renewal showing the private plan still matches current state-plan benefits, which change as the Paid Leave Authority updates the maximum weekly benefit. Miss the renewal and the employer reverts to the state plan, with premium collection backdated to the lapse.

When the private route makes sense

The private plan works best for stable Connecticut workforces of 100-plus employees with multi-year below-average claim history and operational capacity to manage a carrier relationship. For smaller employers, the state plan's simplicity wins. Multi-state employers running Connecticut as one piece of a larger US payroll typically stay in the state plan to avoid building Connecticut-specific carrier tooling.

What that looks like, day to day:

• Sick-leave ledger from day one. 1-per-30 accrual or 40-hour front-load, whichever the policy elects. Carryover within the 40-hour cap. The PA 24-8 written-notice obligation is satisfied at onboarding in a single digital signing session with the I-9 and CT-W4. Headcount tracking flags when the 11-plus threshold trips and when the 1 January 2027 universal-coverage date arrives.
• PFMLA contribution withholding. 0.5 percent on every paycheque up to the Social Security wage base, with quarterly remittance to the Paid Leave Authority. The $922.50 annual cap enforces automatically; high earners hit it mid-year and the deduction stops cleanly.
• PFMLA claim concierge. When a worker files, we handle the wage-history confirmation, file employment-dates verification, coordinate with Aflac, and track the 12-week (or 14-week) clock against the 12-month window. Payroll cash flow is unaffected because the state fund pays the wages.
• CT FMLA job-protection tracker. The Connecticut FMLA overlay (every employer with 1 or more employees since 2022) provides the reinstatement right PFMLA itself does not embed. We maintain the 3-consecutive-month service test and surface protection status on the leave-decision screen.
• PFMLA-FMLA concurrency accounting. Federal FMLA's 12-week bank runs concurrently with PFMLA medical-leave portions where both apply. We track both clocks and label which bank is being drawn down for which week.
• Private-plan-versus-state-plan analysis. For employers asking whether to opt out, we run the trade-off against the employer's actual demographic and claims-experience proxy and surface the break-even premium. When the answer is "stay in the state plan", we say so.

Behind the platform sit real HR and legal experts with deep local employment-law expertise who know the PA 24-8 phase-in, the PFMLA wage-base mechanics, the CT FMLA 3-month service test, and the stacking sequence for complicated pregnancies. When something comes up, you message the same person, an actual person, not a chatbot or a pooled queue.

Contractor onboarding, EOR payroll with full leave administration, and entity graduation all live on one platform. A Connecticut contractor who converts to W-2 keeps their accrual record. That same employee can graduate from EOR to your own US entity without changing systems. One timeline. One platform.

Pricing is one number per employee per month, in any currency you pay us in. Zero FX mark-up. Statutory employer cost passes through itemised on every invoice.

When EOR is the right call (and when it isn't)

EOR works while you're testing the Connecticut market, running a small remote team, or managing one or two hires alongside a larger US payroll elsewhere. Once you have a dozen Connecticut employees and predictable hiring ahead, the maths of running your own US entity starts to win. You can also check how Connecticut compares on worker classification with the Connecticut worker classification state test guide, or review termination obligations on the Connecticut termination law and at-will exceptions page. Teamed's Crossover Calculator tells you the month the EOR model stops being right. The conversation is built into the relationship.