Paid but not protected

A state paid-leave programme is an insurance scheme. You paid into it, you meet an earnings test, it sends you money. Whether your employer has to give you your job back when you return is a completely separate question, answered by a different law with a different set of thresholds — and in several states those thresholds are dramatically narrower than the ones that got you paid.

This is not a technicality. It is entirely possible, and entirely lawful, to receive months of state benefits and be replaced while receiving them.

Where the two systems part company

Every state below pays benefits to workers at essentially any employer, and the line under each state name says at what size. The right-hand column is what it takes to be entitled to your job afterwards.

Rows where the protection threshold is higher than the pay threshold are marked. Federal FMLA sits underneath all of this at 50+ employees, 12 months and 1,250 hours — and it counts employees within 75 miles of your worksite, so a large but scattered employer can fail it.

Rhode Island has the widest gap in the country

Rhode Island created the first temporary disability programme in the United States in 1942, and it is still the most generous: up to 30 weeks of medical leave, covering virtually every worker in the state. Its job-protection law covers workers at employers with 50 or more employees, after 12 months, and only if they averaged enough hours to clear 1,560 hours in the year — about 30 a week.

So a Rhode Island worker at a twenty-person company can draw months of state benefits with no statutory right to her job. So can a part-time worker at a large one: Rhode Island is the only state here whose protection law carries an hours test steep enough to exclude most part-timers outright.

Delaware's gap is different in shape and just as real. Delaware pays benefits at employers with ten or more employees but never wrote a state protection law — its programme deliberately wraps around federal FMLA without broadening it. A worker at a Delaware employer with between 10 and 49 employees is paid by the state and protected by nobody.

The District of Columbia pays with no tenure requirement and no hours requirement at any employer size — among the most permissive pay rules anywhere — while its separate protection law asks for 20+ employees, 12 months and 1,000 hours. The pay is close to universal; the protection is narrower than federal FMLA on tenure.

And where protection is close to universal

Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon and Maine built job protection into the paid-leave law itself, at any employer size, with no minimum-hours test at all. A worker at a three-person shop in Hartford or Portland has a statutory right to her job that a worker at a forty-person firm in Providence does not.

That is the single largest difference between state regimes, and it is invisible if you compare only the money. Two states can pay almost identically and differ completely on whether you have a job at the end of it.

Three things worth knowing beyond the thresholds

Restoration standards differ. Most laws here require your “same or equivalent” position. Massachusetts requires a position of “similar responsibility and compensation”, which is a softer test for the employer. Where federal FMLA also applies, its stronger standard is worth invoking.

Protection can run out before the pay does. The protected period and the paid period are set by different laws and need not be the same length. Where a state pays for longer than it protects, the tail of your leave may be unprotected even if you qualified for both.

Federal FMLA counts employees within 75 miles. A company with 200 employees spread across ten small offices may not be FMLA-covered for any of them. This catches people who assume a big employer automatically means coverage.

What to actually check

1. How many people does your employer employ — and for federal FMLA, how many within 75 miles of where you work? These are two different numbers.
2. How long have you been there, and will you still meet the tenure test on the day your leave starts rather than today?
3. Do you clear the hours test, if your state has one? Part-time and variable-hours workers are the ones who fail these.
4. If you qualify for pay but not protection, ask HR in writing what their policy is. Many employers voluntarily hold jobs open; that is a contractual promise worth having in an email rather than an assumption.

The calculator asks for employer size, tenure and hours precisely because of this, and tells you when you are in the paid-but-unprotected position for your state.

Sources and method

Thresholds are taken from each state's own protection statute and rendered here from the same data the calculator uses, so the table cannot drift from the state pages. Where a state's protection sits in a different law from its pay programme — California's PDL and CFRA, New Jersey's Family Leave Act, New York's built-in PFL right — that law is the one shown.

New Jersey's row changed on 17 July 2026, when its thresholds dropped to 15 employees and three months; this site was ten days late reflecting it, which is written up on the corrections page. The methodology page covers sourcing and re-checking, and the companion pieces cover which state pays the most and when the figures change.