California AB 1033: CFRA Family Leave Eligibility and Penalties

The California Family Rights Act gives eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, recover from their own serious health condition, or handle a qualifying military exigency. Since January 1, 2021, the law has applied to any private employer in California with five or more employees, along with state and local government employers of any size.¹

Which Employers Must Comply

Before 2021, CFRA tracked the federal FMLA: it applied only to employers with 50 or more workers within 75 miles of the employee’s jobsite. Two changes took effect that year. The employer-size threshold dropped to five. And the 75-mile radius disappeared entirely, so a remote worker in Eureka whose six-employee employer is based in San Diego is covered even with no coworker nearby.²

Which Employees Qualify

An employee qualifies for CFRA leave after meeting two conditions. The first is 12 months of service with the employer; those months don’t have to be consecutive, and time already spent on leave counts toward the total. The second is 1,250 hours of actual work in the 12 months before the leave begins. Hours on leave don’t count toward that 1,250.³

Reasons CFRA Leave Is Covered

The 12 weeks can be used for any of four purposes:

Bonding with a newborn, newly adopted child, or child newly placed in foster care, taken within one year of the birth or placement.
Caring for a family member with a serious health condition.
The employee’s own serious health condition that prevents them from doing their job.
A qualifying exigency arising from a spouse, domestic partner, child, or parent’s active military duty or call to duty.

Leave does not have to be taken in one continuous stretch. An employee can take it intermittently, a few hours at a time for medical appointments or a day here and there for recurring treatment, or work a reduced schedule. The employer cannot require the employee to take more time off than the medical situation calls for; two hours needed for a treatment does not become a full day at the employer’s insistence.¹

Family Members You Can Take Leave For

CFRA’s definition of family is substantially broader than federal FMLA’s. The current list covers:²

A child of any age, including a domestic partner’s child
A spouse or domestic partner
A parent or parent-in-law
A grandparent
A grandchild
A sibling
A designated person

The designated person category, added in 2023, lets the employee name anyone related by blood (an aunt, uncle, or cousin) or anyone in a relationship equivalent to family, such as an unmarried partner or close friend. The employee identifies the designated person when requesting leave. An employer may limit each employee to one designated person per 12-month period.¹

Notice and Medical Certification

For foreseeable leave, like a planned surgery or expected due date, the employee owes at least 30 days’ advance notice. For unforeseeable events, the employee notifies the employer as soon as practical, which can be a phone call. When an employee fails to give proper notice for foreseeable leave, the employer can delay the start of leave until notice is provided.⁴

The employer can require medical certification when the leave is for a serious health condition, whether the employee’s or a family member’s. The certification should state when the condition began, how long it is expected to last, and enough facts to show that a serious health condition exists. The employee must get at least 15 calendar days to produce it.⁵

Bonding leave with a healthy newborn or newly placed child cannot be certified, because no health condition is involved. The employer also cannot contact the healthcare provider for anything beyond verifying that the certification is authentic, and cannot demand a specific diagnosis. With an objective, good-faith reason to doubt the certification, the employer can require a second opinion from a different provider at the employer’s expense, and if that opinion conflicts with the first, a third provider jointly chosen can be the tiebreaker, again at the employer’s expense.⁵

A fitness-for-duty release before returning from the employee’s own medical leave is permitted, but only if the employer requires it of everyone returning from illness or disability, not just those on CFRA leave. For intermittent leave, that return-to-work release can be requested at most once every 30 days, and only when a legitimate safety concern exists.⁵

Getting Paid During CFRA Leave

CFRA protects your job. It does not require your employer to keep paying you. Wage replacement comes from a separate state program, Paid Family Leave (PFL), administered by the Employment Development Department.⁶

As of 2026, workers earning below 70 percent of the state average quarterly wage receive 90 percent of their wages through PFL. Workers above that threshold receive 70 percent, up to a maximum weekly benefit of $1,765.⁷

PFL eligibility is separate from CFRA eligibility. You can qualify for PFL wage replacement without being eligible for CFRA job protection, and the reverse is also true. PFL covers bonding and family caregiving but not your own medical condition; that falls under State Disability Insurance.

Health Insurance and Job Reinstatement

While you are on CFRA leave, your employer must continue your group health coverage on the same terms as if you were still working. That applies to medical, dental, vision, mental health, and dependent coverage if those are part of the plan. The employer’s share of the premium stays the same. If you normally pay a portion of the premium, you keep paying it during leave, and the employer has to tell you in writing how and when to pay. If your payment is more than 30 days late, the employer can cancel coverage, but only after at least 15 days’ written notice.⁸

When CFRA leave ends, you have a right to return to the same position or a comparable one. Comparable means virtually identical in pay, benefits, shift, schedule, working conditions, and geographic location, with a commute that doesn’t meaningfully increase, substantially similar duties, and equivalent authority.⁹

One boundary worth flagging: federal FMLA lets employers deny reinstatement to a “key employee” in the highest-paid 10 percent of the salaried workforce if restoring them would cause substantial economic harm.¹⁰ CFRA has no equivalent carve-out. The reinstatement right applies to every eligible employee regardless of pay level.

How CFRA Fits With FMLA and Pregnancy Disability Leave

Employers with 50 or more employees must follow both CFRA and the federal FMLA. Below 50, only CFRA (and California’s Pregnancy Disability Leave law) applies.

When a leave reason is covered by both CFRA and FMLA, the two run concurrently. You get 12 weeks total, not 24. When a reason qualifies under only one law, the clocks run separately. Leave to care for a grandparent, grandchild, sibling, domestic partner, or designated person uses only your CFRA bank, because FMLA does not cover those relationships. Military caregiver leave (up to 26 weeks to care for a seriously injured service member) is an FMLA-only entitlement that CFRA does not match.¹¹

Pregnancy is the layered scenario people most often miss. In California, pregnancy-related disability is covered by Pregnancy Disability Leave (PDL), not CFRA, and PDL provides up to four months. PDL and FMLA run at the same time during the disability. CFRA bonding leave begins after PDL ends. An employee who uses four months of PDL and then 12 weeks of CFRA bonding leave can be out roughly seven months in total. The FMLA 12 weeks will have been exhausted during PDL, so the entire CFRA bonding period is a separate entitlement with no federal overlap.¹² The employer’s duty to maintain health insurance also stacks: coverage must continue through all of PDL and then separately for up to 12 weeks of CFRA leave.⁸

If Your Employer Violates CFRA

The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) enforces CFRA. An employee has three years from the last harmful act to file an administrative complaint with CRD.¹³ You can also request an immediate right-to-sue notice and take the claim to court. Once CRD issues a right-to-sue letter, the lawsuit generally must be filed within one year.

Employees of small employers face an extra step first. For businesses with 5 to 19 employees, CRD runs a mediation program that must be exhausted before a CFRA lawsuit can proceed. After the right-to-sue notice issues, either side has 30 days to request mediation, and if either side asks, both must participate. If neither requests it within 30 days, or both agree to skip it, the employee can file suit. Filing before mediation closes gives the employer grounds to ask the court to pause the case until mediation is complete.¹⁴

Remedies available in a CFRA case include back pay and front pay, compensatory damages for emotional distress and other non-economic harm, punitive damages for egregious conduct, attorney’s fees and litigation costs, and injunctive relief such as reinstatement, policy changes, or workplace training. The two violations CRD sees most often are retaliation against employees who request leave and failure to reinstate returning employees to equivalent positions.

1
California Legislative Information. California Government Code 12945.2
2
Civil Rights Department. Expanded Family and Medical Leave in California
3
Civil Rights Department. Family Care and Medical Leave Quick Reference Guide
4
Civil Rights Department. Family Care and Medical Leave and Pregnancy Disability Leave
5
Legal Information Institute. Cal Code Regs Tit 2, 11091 – Requests for CFRA Leave
6
California Civil Rights Department. Family Care and Medical Leave Quick Reference Guide
7
California Employment Development Department. Maximum Weekly Benefit Amount
8
Legal Information Institute. Cal Code Regs Tit 2, 11092 – Terms of CFRA Leave
9
Legal Information Institute. Cal Code Regs Tit 2, 11089 – Right to Reinstatement
10
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.219 – Rights of a Key Employee
11
University of California San Francisco. FMLA and CFRA Fact Sheet
12
California Civil Rights Department. Leave for Pregnancy Disability and Child Bonding Quick Reference Guide
13
California Civil Rights Department. Complaint Process
14
Civil Rights Department. Small Employer Family Leave Mediation Program