Which state pays the most for maternity leave?

Every comparison of state paid leave lines up the same number: the maximum weekly benefit. It is the figure each state publishes, so it is the figure that gets compared. It is also close to useless on its own, for two reasons.

The first is that a cap only does anything once your wages reach it. California's $1,765 maximum — the highest in the country — does not begin to bind until around $132,000 of income. Below that, the number is irrelevant to you.

The second is bigger: your total depends on how many weeks you are paid, and that ranges from 11 to 22 weeks across these states. A moderate weekly amount for twenty-two weeks beats a high one for eleven.

So here is the comparison actually worth making: the total paid, computed by running the same calculation this site's calculator runs, for the same person in each state.

Total paid leave, by salary

One scenario throughout: a birthing parent, vaginal delivery, 18 months' tenure, a 50+ employee employer, no employer top-up. Totals are gross benefit paid across the whole leave, not weekly.

Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania are absent because they have no state paid-leave programme at all — a birthing parent there receives nothing from the state, whatever she earns.

The number you should be comparing

The variable that actually moves the total is not the weekly cap. It is the combined cap — the ceiling a state puts on medical recovery and bonding leave together.

In New Jersey, California and Rhode Island there is no combined ceiling: the disability programme covers recovery and the family-leave programme covers bonding, and they run one after the other. A New Jersey birthing parent is paid for 22 weeks. Massachusetts caps the pair at 26 weeks and Minnesota at 20, which in practice is not a constraint for a typical birth.

Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware and Maine put both kinds of leave in a single twelve-week bucket. Recovery from the birth comes out of the same twelve weeks as time at home with the baby, so the weeks spent recovering are weeks subtracted from bonding. That is why Oregon pays the highest weekly amount of any state at this salary and still finishes near the bottom of the table: it pays well, for 12 weeks.

If you are comparing two states, compare their combined caps first and their weekly caps second.

Where the ranking changes with your salary

The order in that table is not stable, which is why a single “best state” answer is wrong.

California is fourth at $40,000 and first at $150,000. Its high cap is worth nothing to a lower earner and a great deal to a higher one. New Jersey runs the other way: first at both of the lower salaries, and fifth at the top one, because its $1,119 cap bites early and its total stops growing.

New Jersey is not alone in that. Connecticut and Delaware hit the same ceiling even harder: the total is identical at $75,000 and $150,000. Past a certain income, earning more adds nothing at all to what those states will pay you.

New York deserves its own note, because its position at the lowest salary is worse than its programme suggests. New York's paid family leave is competitive, but the medical-recovery weeks after a birth are covered by a separate disability benefit capped at $170 a week — a figure unchanged since 1989. For a lower earner, those recovery weeks are close to unpaid.

What this does and does not tell you

These are modelled figures for one person: vaginal delivery, established tenure, a large employer, no employer top-up, no complications. Change any of those and the totals move — a caesarean adds recovery weeks, which helps in states with room in the combined cap and does nothing in states without it. A smaller employer can remove job protection without changing the pay. An employer top-up can outweigh the difference between two states entirely.

So treat this as what it is: an argument about which number to compare, not a ranking to plan around. For your own figures, run the calculator — it is the same engine that produced this table, applied to your salary, state and situation.

And if you are weighing a move, the pay is only half of it. Being paid during leave and being entitled to your job afterwards are separate systems with separate thresholds: Rhode Island pays nearly everyone but protects only workers at employers with 50 or more employees, while Connecticut, Minnesota and Oregon protect workers at employers with a single employee — a gap set out in paid but not protected.

How these numbers were produced

Every figure on this page is computed at build time by the same engine behind the calculator, using each state's own replacement formula, tier thresholds, weekly cap, rounding rule and combined-cap interaction. None of it is transcribed from another comparison, and none of it is typed in by hand — when a state changes a cap or a week count, this page changes with it.

One caveat on the caps themselves: they do not all change on 1 January. Several of the states above re-baseline in June, July or October, and in most of them the rate is fixed on the day you file — see when state paid leave benefits actually change.

The underlying figures come from each state's statute and rate announcements; the methodology page describes the sourcing and the re-checking schedule, and the corrections page lists every figure this site has previously got wrong.