Explainer: The FAMILY Act of 2025

Longtime paid leave champions Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), and their Senate and House colleagues are introducing a new version of the Family And Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act, improving on the national paid family and medical leave proposal they have sponsored and fought for since 2013.

This explainer summarizes seven key provisions in the newly updated proposed legislation (FAMILY Act of 2025, to be introduced in the 119th Congress). It highlights changes in these provisions from both the original version (first introduced in the 113th Congress in 2013) and the 2023 version of the bill (introduced in the 118th Congress, summarized here), and explains the likely effects of the changes on workers’ enhanced ability to use the program.

If enacted, the FAMILY Act would:

• Guarantee the vast majority of working people in the United States the ability to access up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave to care for a new child or a loved one with a serious health condition, or to address their own serious health condition. Leave would also be available for military families facing circumstances arising from a service member’s deployment and for survivors of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault to seek services related to the violence.
• Include immediate family members and extended blood-related and chosen family among the family members for whom a worker would be able to provide care.
• Scale benefit payment amount to a worker’s usual wages, so that lower-wage workers would receive up to 85 percent of their wages, with workers at the country’s median weekly wage receiving about 67 percent of their usual pay.
• Ensure that most workers’ jobs would be protected, regardless of the size of the employer they work for or their tenure or hours at their job, allowing them to return to work without facing job loss or retaliation related to their leave.

Compared to prior versions of the FAMILY Act, the FAMILY Act of 2025 includes improvements that would provide:

• More accessibility and fairness for part-time and hourly workers and for people who need intermittent leave in smaller increments of time.
• More access to paid leave for victims of domestic and sexual violence and sex trafficking.
• New provisions to make implementation of the program more efficient and open the door to shortening time frames for the consideration of applications and payment of benefits.
• New parameters for a Government Accountability Office (GAO) study to identify inequities in the consideration and disposition of claims.

One other major change from prior versions of the FAMILY Act is the elimination of payroll contributions and the creation of a dedicated trust fund to pay program benefits. This more flexible approach mirrors the paid leave provisions in the 2021 Build Back Better Act and would allow this paid leave program to be included more easily in a larger package of investments and revenue raisers.

Why A National Paid Family and Medical Leave Program?

A public program like the FAMILY Act is necessary because, left alone, the private and public sectors have failed to guarantee paid time away from work that new parents, family caregivers, and all workers need. Just 27 percent of civilian workers in the United States have dedicated paid family leave at their jobs, and only four in 10 have short-term disability insurance that replaces a share of wages for a worker’s own serious illness or injury. Lower-wage workers are far less likely to have access to paid leave than higher-wage workers—but even half of highly-paid professional workers do not have dedicated paid family leave.

A well-designed national paid leave program would have important benefits for women’s labor force participation and earnings; maternal and child health; gender equity in homes; health outcomes for people with serious health issues and their caregivers; and public health and benefit programs’ cost savings. Businesses would see improvements in worker retention, and the economy would grow.

Guaranteeing access to paid leave is also a racial and economic justice issue, as well as a rural health and economic imperative. With substantial rollbacks in reproductive rights in states that also do not have adequate policies to support children and families, a national paid leave program would also provide much-needed guarantees for parents.

Key Provisions of the FAMILY Act of 2025

The provisions of the newly improved FAMILY Act are built on research-backed lessons from state paid leave programs and policies in other countries.

When the FAMILY Act was first introduced in 2013, only two U.S. states (California and New Jersey) had paid family and medical leave programs in full operation (each added paid family leave to decades-old temporary disability insurance programs), and a third (Rhode Island) had passed but not yet implemented paid family leave as an add-on to its longstanding temporary disability insurance program for personal medical leave.

As of September 2025, 14 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted paid family and medical leave plans, 10 of which are available to workers now, and four of which are in the implementation phase. Workers will be able to access new benefits in three of the four new programs in 2026.

In 2023, when the FAMILY Act was first updated to reflect lessons learned, many of the bill’s improvements reflected those first included in the national paid family and medical leave proposal that the U.S. House of Representatives passed in November 2021 as part of the Build Back Better Act. Since then, state experience and new research have provided even more evidence about effective policy parameters and implementation practices.

In 2025, additional changes to the FAMILY Act reflect new best practices for hourly and part-time workers, additional protections for survivors of sexual assault and trafficking, and lessons learned from state implementation with respect to data sharing, equity in the provision of benefits, and a need to expedite claims processing and payment.

The elimination of a dedicated revenue stream is a departure from state paid leave programs that recognizes two federal legislative realities: (1) The adoption of federal paid leave program will likely come as part of a bigger bill that combines new programs and new revenue; and (2) The U.S. tax system currently favors the ultra-wealthy, and recent national legislation has also cut federal resources for these same individuals and families. In this environment, a regressive payroll tax would further disadvantage lower-and middle-income people.

The following are seven key features of the FAMILY Act of 2025:

(1) Eligibility: The vast majority of workers, including younger workers and workers with less work attachment and lower earnings histories, will be covered.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 makes paid leave available to the vast majority of U.S. workers, as did the FAMILY Act of 2023. People who have earnings from work or self-employment, or have been looking for work and received unemployment benefits, in the months leading up to the need for a paid family and medical leave, and who have earned at least $2,000 in wages or self-employment income in roughly two years leading up to the need for leave, are eligible. Employees of all state and local governments are also eligible.

Original: The original version of the legislation had a higher earnings threshold and required more sustained work history because it used the same formula as Social Security Disability Insurance. The prior version also did not cover public sector workers in 13 states where Social Security benefit receipt was inequitable until very recently. The 2023 version of the bill included updated eligibility criteria to address these issues.

Impact: The FAMILY Act of 2025 will extend eligibility for paid leave benefits to younger workers, part-time workers, and people with intermittent work histories, including those with caregiving interruptions and education breaks. Using a relatively low $2,000 recent earnings threshold means greater inclusion of lower-wage workers and workers with employment interruptions who have recently been working. Particularly in continuing times of economic disruption—when mothers are leaving the workforce, younger workers are having a hard time finding first jobs, and the ranks of long-term unemployed people are growing—the bill’s eligibility standards acknowledge people’s lived needs.

(2) Duration: 12 weeks, beginning with the first day of the need for leave.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act’s duration of leave—up to 12 work weeks of leave—is unchanged from the original bill, although the 2025 version will allow workers to count leave in hours rather than days and accommodates the duration of a workweek for part-time as well as full-time workers.

Beginning with the 2023 version of the FAMILY Act, paid leave would also be available from the first day of a worker’s need for leave, rather than after the exhaustion of a waiting period. Most state paid leave programs do not include waiting periods, including older programs that eliminated waiting periods. The 12 weeks of leave under the FAMILY Act reflects the United States’ 32 years of experience with the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA, the nation’s unpaid leave law), and falls into a reasonable mid-range of the number of weeks that state programs provide.

Original: The original legislation included a five-day waiting period for workers whose leaves lasted less than 15 days in the first month in which benefits were used, and units of time for counting the duration of leave were “caregiving days” rather than “caregiving hours.” The 2023 legislation eliminated the waiting period.

Impact: Counting hours rather than days makes leave more accessible to hourly, part-time, and self-employed workers whose schedules may be irregular. It also allows for people who need smaller increments of leave to get the full value of the leave available rather than having full days counted against a leave allotment when only hours were taken.

A waiting period in the original legislation could have inadvertently excluded or dissuaded people from taking the leave that they needed due to their inability to take, or hardship involved in taking, five work days of unpaid leave. Low-wage workers are much less likely than other workers to have paid sick days or other sources of paid time off to use from their jobs to cover unpaid days away from work for family and medical needs. The waiting period can also cause administrative complexity for workers, employers, and the administering agency.

(3) Reasons: All FMLA personal and family caregiving needs are covered, as is leave for a “qualifying act of violence.”

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 provides workers with leave for reasons also covered by the FMLA, to care for a new child through birth, adoption, or foster placement; care for a loved one with a serious health condition; care for a worker’s own serious health condition when the condition makes the worker unable to perform their usual work; and address circumstances related to a spouse, child’s, or parent’s military deployment.

In 2025, the bill also provides for “safe leave” with a broad definition of “qualifying act[s] of violence” that includes dating violence, domestic violence, family violence, sexual assault, sex trafficking, stalking, other forms of gender-based violence or harassment, and certain threats or acts involving a firearm or other dangerous weapon. This builds on the language first included in 2023, which included leave for medical, legal, or other services related to their own or a loved one’s domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking.

Several state paid leave programs (Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maine, Minnesota, and Oregon) include safe leave provisions.

Original: The original FAMILY Act only included FMLA reasons, which do not include safe leave.

Impact: The newly expanded safe leave provisions, which were developed based on the research and recommendations of a working group of state, national, and tribal experts convened by the Center for American Progress and Futures Without Violence, will help people in abusive or violent situations to seek help or change their circumstances. According to research compiled by Futures Without Violence and the National Partnership for Women & Families, people often stay in unsafe situations because they lack financial security or are unable to miss work. Women, Native people, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA people are more likely to experience violence and are less likely to have paid leave at their jobs.

(4) Family caregiving relationships: Family caregiving leave is available to workers to care for a wide range of loved ones.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 recognizes a range of family caregiving relationships, as did the FAMILY Act of 2023. Workers whose loved ones have a serious health condition—defined as it is in the FMLA as inpatient treatment or continuing outpatient treatment by a health provider for an illness, injury, impairment, or a physical or mental condition—may provide care to a child of any age; a spouse (including a registered domestic partner); a parent, step-parent, parent-in-law, or someone who stood in the shoes of a parent (in loco parentis); a sibling or a sibling’s spouse; a grandparent, grandchild, step-grandparent, or step-grandchild; and “any other individual who is related by blood or affinity whose association is the equivalent of a family relationship.” Seven states (Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington) currently include essentially this same scope of family relationships, and all state programs except one (Delaware) include some extended family caregiving relationships.

Original: The original FAMILY Act included only FMLA-covered family members, which are parents, spouses (with the original FAMILY Act also covering domestic partners), and children under 18 or adult children incapable of self-care. The 2023 version expanded the range of loved ones for whom a worker can provide care.

Impact: Most people use paid leave to care for immediate family, but about one-sixth of workers who needed family or medical leave in 2018 said they did not take it because the family member for whom they needed to provide care was not covered by FMLA family caregiving definitions. Data compiled by the Center for American Progress shows that Black, Latine, Native, and Asian people, immigrants, single-parent families, people without children, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA people are all more likely to have family structures and caregiving needs over the course of their lives that extend beyond traditional nuclear family relationships. The updated FAMILY Act makes family caregiving leave available on a more equitable basis to people in all types of family relationships.

(5) Wage replacement: Workers will receive paid leave benefits on a sliding scale, so that low-wage workers’ benefits will replace a higher share (up to 85 percent) of their average monthly earnings.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 adopts scaled wage replacement, similar to most of the newer state paid family and medical leave programs, as did the 2023 version of the bill. Workers would receive 85 percent of their first $1,257 in average monthly earnings from work or self-employment income. For workers whose earnings are above $1,257 per month, monthly benefits would be a blended rate of 85 percent of the first $1,257, plus 69 percent of average monthly earnings between $1,258 and $3,500, and 50 percent of average monthly earnings between $3,501 and $6,200. Average monthly earnings calculations are based on the worker’s highest year of earnings in the three most recent calendar years.

Using national median weekly wages converted into a monthly wage in the calculations below, this means that:

• A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker would receive 85 percent of their average monthly earnings.
• A person who earns half of the current U.S. median weekly wage working full-time and year-round would receive about 77 percent of their average monthly earnings.
• A person who is paid the current median weekly wage ( $1,196 in the second quarter of 2025) and works full time and year-round would receive about 67 percent of their average monthly earnings.
• A person who is paid 1.5 times the median weekly wage working full time and year-round would receive about 51 percent of their average monthly earnings.
• A higher-wage worker who is paid twice the median weekly wage for full time, year-round work would receive about 39 percent of their average monthly earnings.

The bill provides a maximum monthly benefit of $4,000 and a minimum monthly benefit of $580, as in the original FAMILY Act. All amounts would be indexed over time based on the national average wage index.

Original: The original FAMILY Act provided a flat 66 percent wage replacement rate, up to a maximum monthly benefit of $4,000. The 2023 version shifted to the current progressive formula.

Impact: Scaled wage replacement makes leave accessible to more workers, especially middle- and lower-wage workers. Research shows that a minimum of 80 percent wage replacement is required to make a program accessible for low-wage workers. All except two state paid leave programs now meet or exceed this standard thanks to improvements in two of the older state programs and the incorporation of this best practice in all other states.

(6) Employment protections: Workers who take FAMILY Act leave will be able to return to their jobs, maintain their health insurance coverage, and be protected from workplace retaliation and discrimination.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 provides that workers’ jobs will be protected when they need to take paid family and medical leave, after they have been with their employers for 90 days. This provision was first included in the bill in 2023. This fills the gaps left by worker eligibility and employer coverage rules of the FMLA, which exclude approximately 44 percent of workers. The FAMILY Act also prohibits discrimination and retaliation against workers who apply for, take, or express an intent to apply for or take FAMILY Act leave. Several states have job protection built into their paid leave programs or through an expansion of their unpaid leave laws.

Original: The original FAMILY Act included anti-retaliation protections for workers who applied for or expressed an intent to apply for paid leave benefits, but job protection would only have come through parallel protections of the FMLA in cases where the FMLA applied. Subsequent improvements in the FAMILY Act to increase the range of family members and leave circumstances covered, more attention to the gaps in job protection coverage under the FMLA, and state experience with integrating paid leave and job protection led to the incorporation of paid leave into the FAMILY Act legislation.

Impact: Workers who fall outside the FMLA’s job protections are disproportionately paid lower wages, have less education, live in rural areas, and are single parents, Latine, foreign-born, and women. Many are less likely to have paid leave through their jobs, and they have lower-quality jobs with little workplace voice.

Research from states shows that lack of job protection is a barrier to workers using the paid leave programs available to them. Adding job protection to the FAMILY Act helps to make leave accessible to all workers who have a qualifying need. It also closes gaps in job protection for family caregiving coverage that would arise if FAMILY Act leave were to include an expansive definition of “family” while the FMLA’s family definition remained more limited, and for violence-related leave purposes that are not covered by the FMLA.

(7) State programs: States with pre-existing paid leave programs will be able to continue to offer benefits, with new federal funding available to offset the costs that would otherwise be borne by the federal program.

Current Bill: The FAMILY Act of 2025 adopts a designation of “legacy states” to signify and honor state leadership in the early adoption of paid family and medical leave programs. This concept was first included in then-Chairman Richard Neal’s House Ways and Means Committee Building an Economy for Families Act in 2021 and incorporated into the 2023 version of the legislation.

The legacy states provision says that if states with existing programs at the time the FAMILY Act is enacted can show that their benefits are at least as generous and inclusive as federal benefits, and if states agree to enter into data-sharing agreements with the federal government, federal funding would be available to offset the state program costs that would otherwise be borne by the federal program if workers in those states participated in the federal paid leave program. The notion of legacy states allows workers to continue to receive benefits from their state agencies as they do now, rather than from the new federal Office of Paid Family and Medical Leave that the FAMILY Act creates. The bill also includes a “volunteer advisory body” familiar with state programs to advise the federal government on regulations.

Original: The original FAMILY Act—which was drafted when just three states had added a paid family leave program to longstanding state disability insurance programs—contemplated a “volunteer advisory body” of paid leave experts and state paid leave administrators to harmonize state and federal paid leave benefits. This language remains in the bill, in addition to the newer “legacy state” language described above.

Impact: The FAMILY Act recognizes that workers and businesses in paid leave states are used to receiving benefits from and dealing with a state-based agency and that states have invested time and resources in creating home-grown programs. It also reflects the fact that some states’ benefits are more generous in terms of wage replacement, leave duration, or the purposes for which one may take leave. There are further details to work out with respect to this provision as the legislation moves forward to define the equivalence of benefits and settle other details of federal-state coordination, but the concept of legacy states should facilitate the harmonization and simplification of benefit provision for employers and workers alike.

In addition to the eligibility, coverage, and benefits provisions outlined above, the FAMILY Act includes provisions regarding administration and GAO analysis.

Administration: The FAMILY Act in both its original and 2025 forms creates an Office of Paid Family and Medical Leave within the Social Security Administration (SSA). This federal agency serves similar functions for other national social insurance programs, has good reach into the public with communications capacity and field offices, and has or could easily be granted access to data to administer the FAMILY Act program.

The 2025 version of the FAMILY Act includes new language directing the SSA Commissioner and the heads of other federal agencies to work together to enter into data-sharing agreements that will assist paid leave program staff in administering the benefit, maintaining program integrity, and engaging in public and stakeholder outreach. It also requires the Commissioner to report to Congress on whether access to other federal data sources would aid in program administration and on the feasibility of expediting certain claims beyond the timelines included in the legislation.

In order to equip SSA for success in managing existing responsibilities and taking on new ones, agency technology should be modernized, and core SSA programs and program administration must be fully funded to ensure reliable and efficient customer service.

GAO Analysis: The FAMILY Act directs the GAO to conduct a study after enactment and again every five years. The 2025 bill’s language says that the report should include data on the number of applicants; the duration of time for processing claims; the number and time to disposition of the review of adverse determinations; the number of monthly benefit claims filed and the time to payment; the number of appeals of initial adverse determinations related to monthly benefit reports; and an analysis of the delay in considering claims and paying benefits that includes attention to the reasons for delay, correlations between delay and claimant characteristics, and the identification of other data that SSA should collect as part of a paid leave application to facilitate this type of reporting.

A national paid family and medical leave program like the FAMILY Act has broad public support, has been tested at the state level, and is essential for workers and businesses, families, and the economy. The status quo—where workers depend on employer-sponsored benefits—isn’t working for tens of millions of people and their families.

More than a decade after the original FAMILY Act’s introduction, it’s time for Congress to finally guarantee paid family and medical leave to every working person in the United States, no matter where they live or work, their job, or their serious care needs.

For further reading

Federal policy and landscape:

The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act (National Partnership for Women & Families)

Paid Leave in 2025: Three Crucial Battlegrounds for Working People and Families (New America)

State of Paid Family and Medical Leave in the U.S. in 2025 (Center for American Progress)

Paid Leave is Back on the Agenda: Exploring the Economic and Social Benefits (New America)

Evolution of Paid Family and Medical Leave Policy (Urban Institute and New America)

State policies:

Explainer: Paid and Unpaid Leave Programs in the United States (New America)

Explainer: State Paid Leave Benefits and Funding in the United States (New America)

Comparative Chart of Paid Family and Medical Leave Programs in the United States (A Better Balance)

State Paid Family and Medical Leave Laws (National Partnership for Women & Families)