Improving our collective understanding of intermittent leave use and administration
Multiple States
July 2025 - October 2025
Why This Matters For Families
Over the past 20 years, 13 states and D.C. have adopted paid family and medical leave (PFML) programs that provide income support to people who need time off work when a new child is added to the family, they need to care for a family member, or they suffer their own personal health issue. Paid leave is associated with higher labor force participation rates, higher earnings over time, better health, worker retention and productivity, and economic growth.
The New Practice Lab team is working directly with state administrators, as well as the individuals and families whom they serve, to streamline state paid leave program benefits. The team has also offered guidance to states working to pass paid family and medical leave laws, offering advice on language and processes that will aid benefit delivery to claimants and families. These programs can provide critical relief to U.S. families — but only if they reach the people who need them, when they need them.
Implementation Challenge
Paid leave program participants can choose to take leave either continuously or intermittently. “Continuous leave” is when an individual takes a consecutive block of leave (e.g., 4 weeks for a surgery and recovery) whereas “intermittent leave” is when someone may take leave in shorter periods of time (e.g., a day or two sporadically when they have a debilitating migraine, or are attending treatment for a chronic condition). Administering continuous leave is better understood by programs and can be more seamlessly administered — there is more comprehensive user research to refer to, more thorough measurement of programmatic operations, and more straightforward communication to employers about when an employee is and isn’t going to be working. Intermittent leave is more complex to implement, and there is less qualitative research on who takes intermittent leave, how they need it and when, how they experience accessing, applying, and reporting it, and how it affects their employer.
Even without robust programmatic operational data about intermittent leave use, our team’s earlier work in paid leave has presented extensive evidence of intermittent leave being most needed by those managing their own disability or chronic illness, as well as those that are providing care to loved ones with chronic conditions.
Our Approach
The New Practice Lab sought to fill the collective knowledge gap present regarding both the experience of participants and leading practices to administer intermittent leave. We primarily sought to begin answering the following questions:
How common is intermittent leave?
Who takes intermittent leave, and why?
How do leave takers experience intermittent leave?
OBJECTIVE
Provide a first attempt at answering guiding questions (above) that if answered, could point to priority pain points or areas for further exploration and research to begin improving both the experience interacting with and efficiency of administering intermittent leave.
WHAT WE DID
We began by requesting operational data from four active paid leave programs (Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Washington, D.C.)
Conducted interviews about intermittent leave administration with staff in four active paid leave programs.
Interviewed 9 users of intermittent leave, and interviewed HR staff from 3 small businesses whose employees had recently used intermittent leave, about their experience.
“We had only one HR person always in my contact, and that person was not happy each time I reached out, so I had to feel guilty each time I had to take care of myself. …So there are times that he also gave me wrong information, and at that point. I called the State level directly, and the State person got involved and reached out to my employee directly, and they say, No, you are doing [it] wrong. I forgot exactly the matter, but even the HR had messed up, and the state level had to inform by calling.”
Intermittent Paid Leave Program Participant
“Overtime is something that I'm trained on how to do directly, and I can take a thousand courses on how to do overtime calculations and meal penalties. [The training on] medical leave filing and what I'm responsible for is limited because it's not really my job to do those things. I just have to do the audit, so the state hasn't invested the same way.”
Small Business Employer
What We Learned
Our team then synthesized our findings into a set of benchmarks, experiential themes, and tactical recommendations for programs to use as they build and iteratively improve their paid leave programs. These take-away’s from this initial research effort included:
Intermittent leave is a common use case (the demand exists from residents of states in which the program exists), accounting for anywhere between 17% and 25% of claims in the active PFML programs we talked to
Leave takers used intermittent leave in every major category of leave (bonding with a new child, personal medical needs, and caretaking for family members)
Employee’s experiences of taking intermittent leave is significantly affected by their employer’s understanding of the program
Employers who are uninformed or misinformed about the paid leave program can end up accusing employees of lying or poor communication, which can lead to adverse workplace consequences for leave takers
This can be exacerbated by official notices from the state to employers, where generic or overly broad language may confuse employers
Employees need to navigate both company HR and their direct supervisor – these two entities can vary significantly i(n both their understanding of the program and level of support for the leave taker
Employers, especially small businesses, face significant logistical challenges when navigating intermittent leave
Business HR staff receive minimal information from the state about an individual’s intermittent leave usage, which makes it hard for them to keep track of whether an employee is using sick time, PTO, or state paid leave on any given day – this calculation gets even more confusing for employers who try to “top off” paid leave so that their staff get full wage replacement
Small businesses are not set up to continue operations as usual when an employee is on leave, especially when an employee is out on short notice
Businesses are not sure what boundaries and expectations they can set with employees who have been approved for intermittent leave – sometimes to the point of losing substantial revenue due to employees being unavailable
Next Steps
The findings from this research were immediately useful to multiple program administrators, and were eagerly received. We have presented findings and recommendations to the Minnesota Paid Leave and Maryland FAMLI teams, who have both expressed an intention of putting multiple pieces of our work into practice. We will also share our research with the Economic Opportunity Institute, at their request, as they shape their paid leave agenda for Washington’s next legislative session.We are in conversation with two additional states about how the findings are most relevant to the administration of their programs as well, and will be sharing insights with a broader convening of paid leave administrators in early 2026.
