Maryland Healthy Working Families Act: Sick and Safe Leave Rules

The Maryland Healthy Working Families Act requires nearly every employer in the state to give workers sick and safe leave. If the business has 15 or more employees, that leave is paid at your normal wage. If it has 14 or fewer, the leave is unpaid. Either way, you earn one hour for every 30 hours you work, you can use it for your own or a family member’s health needs or for situations involving domestic violence, and your employer cannot punish you for taking it.

Paid or Unpaid Depends on Employer Size

The line is 15 employees. At or above that number, your sick and safe leave hours are paid at your regular rate. Below it, the same leave is available but unpaid.¹ Employer size is measured by the average monthly number of employees during the prior year, so a business that hovers near the threshold can shift categories from one year to the next.

Who the Law Doesn’t Cover

Three groups of workers are carved out of the statute:²

Employees who regularly work fewer than 12 hours per week.
Construction workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement that explicitly waives these requirements. Janitors, building cleaners, security officers, and similar support staff at construction sites are not construction workers for this purpose and remain covered.
On-call health and human services workers who can accept or reject shifts as needed and are not guaranteed work. This exception does not apply if you’re placed through a temporary staffing agency.

The Maryland Department of Labor identifies additional exempt categories, including certain independent contractors and some agricultural workers.³ If your work arrangement is unusual, the Department can help you confirm where you stand.

How You Earn Hours

Accrual is straightforward: one hour of leave for every 30 hours worked, beginning on your first day.⁴ There’s a catch. Your employer can make you wait 106 calendar days before you actually use any of the hours you’re banking, which is roughly three and a half months.

Two ceilings apply. Your employer doesn’t have to let you earn more than 40 hours in a single year, and it can cap how much you use in a year at 64 hours.⁴ Some employers skip the hour-by-hour math and front-load 40 hours at the start of each benefit year. When they do, separate carryover rules can apply.³

Carryover and Leaving the Job

You can carry up to 40 unused hours into the next benefit year, so long as doing so doesn’t push your total balance past 64 hours.³ If you already have 50 hours banked at year’s end, only 14 of them carry over.

Your employer isn’t required to pay out unused leave when you leave the job. But if you’re rehired by the same employer within 37 weeks, any hours you had earned and not used must be restored.³ Workers returning after a short gap sometimes forget to ask for that balance back.

What You Can Use the Leave For

The sick side of the law covers your own physical or mental health, including treatment, recovery, and preventive care like an annual checkup. It also covers caring for a family member with a health condition or bringing one to an appointment. The statute defines family broadly, including children, spouses, parents, grandparents, and grandchildren. Maternity and paternity leave qualify as well.⁵

The safe side covers situations where you or a family member has experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking. Qualifying uses include getting medical or mental health care related to the incident, accessing services from a victim support organization, pursuing legal help or attending related proceedings, and temporarily relocating to escape danger.⁵

How to Request It

You can take leave in the smallest time increment your employer’s payroll system tracks, though the employer can set a minimum increment as large as four hours.⁵ A four-hour minimum can turn a brief medical appointment into a half-day off the balance, so it’s worth checking your employer’s policy before you request time.

Your employer cannot make you find someone to cover your shift. That responsibility belongs to the employer. As an alternative to using leave, you and your employer can agree that you’ll swap shifts or make up the hours within the same pay period.⁵

For a foreseeable absence like a scheduled procedure or a prenatal appointment, your employer can require up to seven days of advance notice. When the need is unexpected, notify your employer as soon as it’s practical and follow the company’s usual absence-reporting procedures, as long as those procedures don’t get in the way of actually using the leave. An employer can deny a request when you didn’t give proper notice, but only if your absence would also cause a disruption. Both conditions have to be true.⁵

Verification rules are narrower than most workers assume. Your employer can require documentation of a qualifying reason only if you were out for more than two consecutive scheduled shifts. A single sick day doesn’t trigger it. There’s also a narrow window between your 107th and 120th calendar day of employment when verification can be required, but only if you both agreed to that at hiring.⁴ Refusing verification when it’s legitimately required lets your employer deny a future request for the same reason.

What Your Employer Must Tell You

Before you start work, your employer must give you written notice explaining how leave accrues, the qualifying reasons for using it, the retaliation protections in the law, and your right to file a complaint.⁶ The official Maryland Earned Sick and Safe Leave poster should be displayed where employees can see it and is available through the Department of Labor.⁷ The state’s model policy also recommends employers include a statement of used and available leave with each pay period.⁸ If you don’t have a way to check your balance, ask.

Your Employer Cannot Retaliate

Maryland prohibits any adverse action against an employee who uses sick and safe leave in good faith. That includes firing, demotion, threats, and any change to job conditions that would discourage a reasonable person from exercising these rights.⁹

One rule catches employers off guard often enough to call out: sick and safe leave absences cannot count under a point-based attendance policy. If your workplace assigns points for absences and uses them to trigger discipline, earned leave has to be excluded from that count entirely.⁹ Workers in retail, food service, and warehouse jobs where point systems are common should watch for this.

You’re also protected if you complained in good faith about a suspected violation, even if the complaint turns out to be mistaken.⁹

Filing a Complaint and What You Can Recover

If you believe your employer has violated the law, file a written complaint with the Commissioner of Labor and Industry. The Commissioner must investigate within 90 days and will first try to resolve the dispute through mediation.¹⁰

When mediation fails and the Commissioner finds a violation, the order can include the full monetary value of any unpaid leave plus actual economic damages, additional damages of up to three times your hourly wage for each violation, and a civil penalty of up to $1,000 per non-compliant employee. The employer has 30 days to comply. If it doesn’t, you have three years to file a civil lawsuit to enforce the order, and a court can award triple the value of unpaid leave, punitive damages, attorney’s fees, and injunctive relief.¹⁰ The stacked remedies are the reason most disputes settle before they get that far.

1
Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1304 – Requirements; Calculation of Leave
2
Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1303
3
Maryland Department of Labor. Maryland Healthy Working Families Act Frequently Asked Questions
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Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1305
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Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1305 – Use of Leave
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Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1306 – Notifications to Employees
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Maryland Department of Labor. Maryland Earned Sick and Safe Leave Employee Notice
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Maryland Department of Labor. Maryland Sample Earned Sick and Safe Leave Policies
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Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1309
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Maryland General Assembly. Maryland Code Labor and Employment 3-1308