Colorado HFWA: Accrual, Covered Uses, and Retaliation

Colorado’s Healthy Families and Workplaces Act (HFWA) gives nearly every worker in the state paid sick leave, earned at one hour for every 30 hours worked and capped at 48 hours a year. Colorado HFWA paid sick leave is available from your first day on the job, covers illness, caregiving, bereavement, and safety-related absences, and protects you from retaliation if you use it or ask about it.¹

Who Is Covered

Every employer in Colorado is covered, no matter how small. Private businesses, state agencies, school districts, and local governments all fall under the law, and headcount does not change that.²

Coverage on the employee side is just as wide. Full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers all qualify from day one, including during a probationary period. Colorado defines an “employee” as anyone performing labor or services for an employer, with control over the work and its centrality to the business being the key factors.³ Genuine independent contractors who run their own business and work free of employer control are not covered.

Only two groups are exempt: federal government workers and railroad employees covered by the federal Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act.⁴ Employers cannot write a contract or policy that waives HFWA rights.

How Much Leave You Earn

You accrue one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked, up to 48 hours in a benefit year.² That is the statutory floor; employers can be more generous but not less.

Unused leave rolls over into the next year, up to 48 hours. Even so, your employer can cap total usage at 48 hours in a single year unless a public health emergency is in effect.¹

Some employers skip accrual and front-load the full 48 hours at the start of the benefit year. That is allowed as long as every other HFWA requirement is met. A general paid-time-off (PTO) policy can also satisfy HFWA obligations, but only if the PTO terms are at least as generous as the statute and employees are told so in writing before they need to use it.⁵

One limit worth knowing: unused accrued sick leave is not paid out when you leave the job. Employers do not have to cash out your remaining hours at separation.

What You Can Use It For

The core use is health: your own physical or mental illness, injury, or condition, or a family member’s. That includes diagnosis, treatment, and routine preventive care like checkups and vaccinations.²

“Family member” is defined broadly. It covers immediate family and also anyone you are responsible for arranging health- or safety-related care for, which can include a close friend, a neighbor, or an elderly person you regularly look after. No blood or legal relationship is required.⁶

Senate Bill 23-017 added several non-medical reasons:⁷

Bereavement, including attending a funeral or memorial and handling financial or legal matters after a family member’s death.
Caring for a family member whose school or childcare provider has closed because of weather, power loss, water loss, or another unexpected event.
Evacuating your home because of weather, utility failure, or another unexpected situation.

Separate safe-time provisions apply if you or a family member are dealing with domestic abuse, sexual assault, or criminal harassment. Leave can be used to seek medical attention, mental health counseling, legal services, victim advocacy, or to relocate.

Extra Leave During a Public Health Emergency

When a public health emergency is declared, HFWA triggers a larger block of leave on top of what you have accrued. Full-time employees working 40 or more hours a week get access to at least 80 hours total. Part-time employees get the greater of their scheduled hours in a 14-day period or their average actual hours over the 14 days before the declaration or the leave request.⁵

The employer can count your unused accrued hours toward that 80-hour total, so it supplements rather than purely adds on. You keep accruing at the normal rate. Emergency leave stays available until four weeks after the emergency is officially terminated or suspended.⁸

Qualifying uses include isolating after a diagnosis or symptoms, seeking testing or treatment, getting preventive care, caring for a family member in any of those situations, situations where a public official has determined your presence at work would jeopardize others’ health, and a child’s school or care provider closing because of the emergency.

How to Request Leave and When You Need Documentation

Request leave the same way you normally communicate with your employer: a call, text, email, or written note. For scheduled events like surgery, give notice as soon as you reasonably can. For emergencies, notify your employer before your shift starts if possible, but the law does not deny leave just because you could not warn anyone in advance.²

For absences of three consecutive workdays or fewer, your employer cannot require a doctor’s note or any other documentation. For longer absences, your employer may ask for reasonable documentation, such as a provider’s note for medical leave or a police report or counselor’s statement for safe-time leave. Even then, your employer cannot demand details about the nature of a medical condition or the circumstances of a domestic violence situation, and whatever you do share must be kept confidential.

Leave must be used in increments of at least one hour, unless your employer allows smaller blocks.⁶

How Your Pay Is Calculated

You get paid at the same rate you would have earned had you worked the shift, on your normal pay schedule. For most hourly and salaried workers, that is the usual rate minus overtime premiums and discretionary bonuses.²

Certain pay structures work differently:

Tipped employees who normally earn below the full minimum wage because of tips must be paid the full minimum wage for leave hours. Tips do not count toward leave pay.
Commission earners with a base hourly or salary rate are paid at the base rate or the applicable minimum wage, whichever is higher. If there is no base rate, the leave rate factors in set hourly rates, shift differentials, tip credits, and commissions.
Variable-rate employees whose rate cannot be calculated in advance are paid at the average regular rate over the 30 calendar days before the leave, excluding overtime premiums, bonuses, and holiday pay.

Salaried employees whose pay is not reduced by taking sick leave do not receive a separate sick-leave payment on top of their salary. The same can apply to commission earners whose commission covers a multi-day or multi-week period and is not reduced by the absence.

Retaliation and the Attendance-Point Trap

It is illegal for an employer to punish you for using paid sick leave, asking about your rights, filing a complaint, or cooperating with an investigation. Retaliation includes firing, demotion, suspension, or any other negative employment action tied to your protected activity.⁹

One provision catches employers off guard: if your workplace uses a points-based attendance system, HFWA-protected leave cannot add points to your record. Counting protected leave as an “absence” for discipline purposes is itself retaliation. The protections also apply if you raise a concern in good faith, even if the alleged violation turns out to be a misunderstanding.

Filing a Complaint and What You Can Recover

If your employer denies leave, docks your pay, or retaliates, you can file a complaint with the Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. You can also send your employer a written demand for pay or other remedies and wait 14 days for a response before going straight to court.¹⁰

Once you file with the Division, your employer gets a notice describing the claims and has 28 days to respond. If the investigation runs longer than 180 days, you can demand that the Division close the case within 30 days so you can pursue it in another forum. Available remedies for retaliation include:

Back pay from the date of the loss through the date of the order.
Reinstatement, or front pay if reinstatement is not feasible.
Emotional distress damages.
Liquidated damages equal to your economic damages.
Attorney fees and costs.
Orders requiring the employer to change policies, fix violations, or issue corrective notices.

Each affected employee counts as a separate violation for penalty purposes. Interest on money owed accrues at 8% per year, compounded annually.

How HFWA Fits With FMLA and the ADA

HFWA does not replace federal protections. It stacks with them. If you qualify for unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), you can use your HFWA-accrued paid sick leave at the same time, so you get paid during what would otherwise be unpaid FMLA leave. Your employer can also require you to use accrued paid leave concurrently with FMLA leave.¹¹

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), employers must treat leave tied to a disability the same as any other leave request, without stricter documentation or different conditions. If you exhaust all available paid leave, your employer may still need to provide additional unpaid leave as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, as long as it does not create an undue hardship for the business.¹² HFWA sets the paid-leave floor in Colorado, and federal law can extend your total protected time off beyond it.

1
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-403 – Paid Sick Leave – Accrual – Carry Forward to Subsequent Year
2
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. INFO 6B – Rights and Obligations Under HFWA
3
Justia. Colorado Code 8-4-101 – Definitions
4
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-402 – Definitions
5
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. INFO 6B – Employer/Employee Rights and Obligations Under HFWA
6
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act – Revised August 7, 2023
7
Colorado General Assembly. SB23-017 – Additional Uses Paid Sick Leave
8
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act
9
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-407 – Employee Rights Protected – Retaliation Prohibited
10
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. INFO 5C – Complaints, Investigations, and Remedies
11
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 28 – The Family and Medical Leave Act
12
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employer-Provided Leave and the Americans with Disabilities Act