If you get sick after July 1st, you will likely be eligible for paid sick leave. Thanks to the Healthy Families Act of 2014, virtually every employer in California must provide paid sick leave to their employees.
Many non-benefited employees are excited that getting the flu won’t impact their wallet. But many employers, especially small employers, are concerned about the cost of the new law because employers have to pay employees to not be at work, and there is a lot of administrative overhead around this new (and confusing) law.
WHO is Eligible to Receive Paid Sick Leave?
- Any employee who works for 30 days or more after 1/1/15 is eligible for paid sick leave. This includes full-time, part-time and seasonal employees.
HOW Much Paid Sick Leave can an Employee get?
- Employees will accrue 1 hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. If sick leave is accrued, then it must carry over year-to-year, but the employer can cap it at 48 hours.
- Alternatively, the employer can award 24 hours of paid sick leave at the beginning of each year. In this case, sick leave does not have to accrue or be carried over.
How do employees USE it?
- Once your employee has worked for 90 days or more, they can use their accrued paid sick leave.
- The employer can limit the use of paid sick leave to 24 hours per year.
- The employee can use the paid sick leave for their own health condition or for the health condition of a family member.
What do EMPLOYERS have to do?
- Display a Sick Leave Poster at their place of work
- Provide an Individualized Notice to each employee by 7/8/15 or earlier
- Show the amount of paid sick leave available to the employee on their paystub (or other written form) on each payday
- Keep records of sick leave for 3 years
- Employers do NOT have to pay out accrued sick leave when their employee terminates their employment
- If the employer operates in a location that already has a sick leave policy then they have to follow the more generous plan
What can Cromwell Tax & Bookkeeping do to help Employers with this?
- Payroll is very complicated and the penalties associated with mistakes are very high. Payroll is one job that you do not want to do yourself. Cromwell Tax & Bookkeeping offers full service payroll support that is affordable for small companies.