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Delaware Paid Family & Medical Leave: Do You Qualify?
Delaware's paid leave program, created by the Healthy Delaware Families Act, started paying benefits in 2026. What you can take depends on the reason and on how big your employer is.
Check your Delaware leave eligibility →- Parental leave
- Up to 12 weeks
- Medical / family
- Up to 6 weeks / 24 mo
- Combined cap
- 12 weeks / year
- Eligibility
- 1,250 hrs in 12 mo
The categories don't add up
Delaware splits leave into parental (bonding with a new child), medical (your own serious condition), and family caregiving. Parental runs up to 12 weeks; medical and family caregiving run up to six weeks in any 24-month period. But there's a hard ceiling: no more than 12 weeks of all types combined in a single application year. Take full parental leave and you've used the year's allowance.
Which of these your employer has to offer depends on headcount. The parental piece reaches smaller employers, while the medical and family caregiving pieces apply at larger ones. The program also acts as the primary payor when you'd otherwise stack it with employer short-term disability.
Who qualifies
You generally need to have worked at least 1,250 hours over the previous 12 months for a covered Delaware employer. Benefits replace part of your wages up to a state cap. Details and applications live at labor.delaware.gov.
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 Delaware leave assessment →