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California Paid Family & Medical Leave: Do You Qualify?
California splits two things people usually treat as one: the money while you're out, and the right to your job when you come back. Different programs, different rules, and you can qualify for one without the other.
Check your California leave eligibility →- Paid family leave
- Up to 8 weeks
- Own disability (SDI)
- Up to ~52 weeks
- Pregnancy disability (PDL)
- Up to 4 months
- Job protection (CFRA)
- Up to 12 weeks
Who pays you, and who protects your job
Paid Family Leave and State Disability Insurance handle the pay. PFL covers up to eight weeks to bond with a new child or care for a seriously ill family member; SDI covers your own illness, injury, or pregnancy recovery. Both come out of the SDI fund you've been paying into through payroll, so there's no tenure or company-size requirement to collect them. Eligibility runs off your recent earnings.
Keeping your job is a separate question. That protection comes from the California Family Rights Act, and CFRA has its own bar: 12 months with the employer, 1,250 hours worked in the year before leave, and an employer with five or more people. Plenty of Californians qualify for the PFL check but not CFRA protection, which is the mistake worth avoiding.
Pregnancy is handled on its own track
If you're pregnant, Pregnancy Disability Leave protects up to four months for the period a doctor says you can't work. There's no minimum tenure, and it applies at employers with five or more employees. Recovery time under PDL and bonding time under CFRA are different periods, so they can run back to back rather than overlap, which is how a birth parent ends up with more total time off than the eight-week PFL figure alone suggests.
The only way to know where you land is to run your own numbers: your tenure, hours, employer size, and reason for leave all move the answer. Leavely's free assessment walks through it in a couple of minutes and shows both whether you'll be paid and whether your job is protected.
Start your free California leave assessment →