“The new sick leave rules are confusing me. Explain it to me based on my own illness in mid-March. I was out for 3 days due to a really bad cold and missed a few more partial days the following week. How would the sick leave law work in this situation?”
My HR Survival Tip
Let me show you the two variations possible, with the sick leave being “front loaded” versus “accrued.” We’ll use a calendar year as the “plan year” for convenience.
Front-loaded sick leave means you received all 24 hours of paid sick leave on January 1st (the beginning of the plan year). Based on your illness, here’s what happens:
- Before your illness, you would have seen your sick leave balance of 24 hours listed on your pay stub (aka wage statement).
- You used all 24 hours for those 3 days and have no further paid sick leave available.
- We can’t use that sick time as poor attendance because it’s protected.
- We could not ask for a doctor’s note until you were out for more than 3 days but you returned to work so it wasn’t necessary.
- When you took additional time off the next week due to illness, it was unpaid time off. (If you are an exempt employee and worked a partial day but went home sick, we would still have to pay you for the whole day.)
- Once your 24 hours were used last week, we can count any additional sick time off (whether we pay for it or not) against you for performance or attendance issues.
- You won’t have any more time available until January 1st when you get your balance refilled to 24 hours.
Accrued sick leave means you are earning 1 hour of sick leave for every 30 hours you work. So, 2.5 months into the year, you have accrued approximately 13.5 hours at the time you were ill. Based on your illness, here’s what happens:
- You will see your sick leave accrued balance of 13.5 hours listed on your pay stub (aka wage statement).
- You would only be paid for time accrued, which was 13.5 hours at the time, and the remaining time off would be unpaid. (If you are an exempt employee and worked a partial day but went home sick, we would still have to pay you for the whole day.)
- Those 13.5 hours would be protected time off but the additional time off could be used against you for performance or attendance issues.
- We could have asked for a doctor’s note once you were out of accrued sick leave.
- You will continue accruing up to 48 hours total for the calendar year but can only use 24 hours per calendar year, of which you’ve already used 13.5 hours.
- If you’re sick again, you can use whatever is currently accrued at that time up to the remaining 10.5 hours available this calendar year.
This is the simple view of how you’d treat sick leave. It’s really important that you track usage … if you can’t show when the time was used, you’ll have to make the full 24 hours available again.
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