The challenges you see with employee leave management don’t disappear as you scale. Professional Employer Organizations (PEOs) who manage leave across hundreds (or thousands!) of employers have to navigate the same manual processes, fragmented systems, and compliance concerns.

Today, we're unveiling our solution to this industry-wide challenge: Cocoon for PEOs.

Our leave management solution for PEOs is designed to eliminate manual work, reduce complexity and risk, and deliver a seamless experience for every stakeholder involved—PEOs, their employer clients, and their client’s employees. Built on our proven leave management technology, Cocoon for PEOs adds the critical tools and functionality needed to manage leave at scale.

Why we built Cocoon for PEOs

In our conversations with PEO leaders across the country, we heard the same challenges again and again: "Leave management is monopolizing my team's time", "Our clients are confused and frustrated and so are their employees”, "We're worried about legal exposure with so many jurisdictions to manage", "There's no single source of truth across our multiple systems".

Traditional approaches to leave management simply weren't designed for the unique challenges PEOs face. We knew there had to be a better way—and we saw an opportunity to build on what we've already created for employers by adding the tools PEOs need to manage leave across multiple organizations simultaneously. And so Cocoon for PEOs came to life!

And we're already seeing traction—we've partnered with one of the nation's leading PEOs as our first client. They share our vision for modern, scalable leave management that serves every stakeholder and this implementation represents a major step forward to modernize leave management for PEOs. We’re also in discussion with several other major PEOs to implement Cocoon for PEOs—a clear signal that the industry is ready for a technology-powered solution to this persistent challenge.

Finally, automated leave management for PEOs

Cocoon for PEOs is a centralized, automated leave management platform that scales with you—and gives you the power to serve your clients with clarity, consistency, and confidence. Let Cocoon’s software handle everything from employee leave planning, to leave management including compliance, all the way through assisting employees with state and private insurance claims, and calculating payroll during leave. 

Our solution is designed with multi-employer operations in mind:

• Multi-employer management: Seamlessly toggle between employer profiles to streamline workflows
• Full leave lifecycle control: Act on behalf of employees and employer admins when needed
• Comprehensive audit trails: Access a log of every action taken on a leave for record keeping
• Bulk implementation: Onboard clients at scale drastically reducing implementation time

And while you gain advanced tools and controls, your clients and their employees still experience Cocoon’s trusted, intuitive leave platform—the same one they know and love.

Why Cocoon is the complete leave management solution for PEOs

Cocoon for PEOs replaces manual systems with end-to-end workflow automation designed specifically for multi-employer management. Our platform is uniquely built to serve three stakeholder groups simultaneously:

1. PEO administrators who manage leave across multiple clients
2. Employer clients who need visibility and control
3. Employees who deserve a seamless leave experience

This creates a single source of truth that improves visibility, reduces administrative burden, and increases client satisfaction. Ours is the first platform to bring clarity, compliance, and scale into one unified experience for PEOs.

Let us solve your biggest leave management challenges

With Cocoon for PEOs, you can:

Improve client satisfaction

Give your clients and their employees easy-to-use tools, complete visibility, and a smoother leave experience that sets you apart from competing PEOs. 74% of customers say Cocoon is a “must-have” tool in their HR stack.

Automate compliance

Eliminate risk with Cocoon's rules engine that handles leave compliance federally and across all 50 states—including eligibility calculations, required notices, and time balance tracking.

Reduce administrative burden

Automate employee leave planning, leave compliance, pay calculations, insurance claims, and more—giving your team tens of hours back per leave. Scale your leave operations without scaling your team. Teams spend 50% less time managing leave when they use Cocoon.

Centralize information

Replace scattered systems with one platform everyone can trust—creating a seamless experience across PEO teams, employers, and employees. As an HR user noted: “I love having one system for employees to go to and knowing it's compliant, and being able to look for information in the portal in case I need specific details (pay, time remaining, return to work).”

The future of leave is here, join us

Cocoon for PEOs is more than just software—it's a smarter way to work, a better experience for your clients, and a more scalable model for your business.

The competition for PEO clients is fierce, and those offering modern, digital-first experiences for critical HR functions like leave management will have a clear advantage. Whether you're managing 100 employers or 10,000, we've built Cocoon for PEOs to scale with your business.

👉 Request a demo to see the platform in action. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve created!

Even if your company has a clear medical leave policy and understands its FMLA obligations and state law requirements, there’s still another layer of decisions and understanding when it comes to reviewing and approving medical leave requests: how you want to handle medical certifications. The three main questions you need to answer (that we’ll guide you through) are:

1. Should you request employees complete a medical certification form? 
2. How closely will you scrutinize it? (And what are you scrutinizing for?)
3. When can/should you request more information than you initially receive? 

The risk of error and non-compliance can rise when managing this decision manually, in addition to being time-consuming. This guide breaks down the key decisions employers need to make about medical certification paperwork, with insights into how Cocoon can help you automate and document the process.

What is a Serious Health Condition (SHC) form?

Under FMLA, medical leave is granted only to those with a serious health condition (as defined by the law) that prevents them from working. Though a Serious Health Condition (SHC) form (aka Form WH 380E) is not legally required for FMLA compliance, many employers find it helpful to substantiate an employee’s need for medical leave under state leave laws and company medical leave policies. It asks for information that must be supplied for an FMLA medical leave regardless of the condition or nature of leave sought, like: contact information for the healthcare provider, dates the medical condition started or will start, an estimate of how long the condition will last, whether leave will be taken on a continuous or intermittent basis, and other pertinent facts to justify and provide insight into the likely duration of the leave. They might also include details about the type of care, treatment, care regimens, and conditions an employee is facing.

Should you require a medical certification form?

When evaluating and approving medical leaves, the first thing employers must decide is if they want to request/require a medical certification form to justify the need for leave. Though the SHC form itself is optional under FMLA, most employers tend to require some type of certification to proactively comply with other FMLA requirements, prevent leave abuse, and effectively manage the operational impact of an employee’s absence. Additionally, for some leaves that are eligible for short-term disability or state disability/leave benefits, the employee might be required to provide medical documentation similar to and potentially including the same information as an SHC form regardless to file claims for short term disability or state paid leave benefits.

The FMLA also does not require employees or employers to use any specific certification form—Form WH 380E or otherwise. If there are certain details your organization prefers to know, then you could create your own form for a healthcare provider to sign off on. Employers, however, cannot reject a medical certification that contains all the information needed to determine if the leave is FMLA-qualifying. For example, employers cannot refuse: 

• A fax or copy of the medical certification
• A medical certification that is not completed on the employer’s standard company form, or 
• Any other record of the medical documentation, such as a communication on the letterhead of the healthcare provider.

💡 Cocoon automatically tracks medical certification requests, the documents and information submitted for them, and stores them securely.

Issues that can arise when submitting medical certifications/SHC forms

If some sort of medical documentation is needed to support a leave request, you can almost guarantee that you’ll encounter some speed bumps.  Here are some of the more likely ones:

1. Forms don’t get submitted

If an employee simply never submits a medical certification form or refuses to do so, you can deny the leave. However, it may be worth discussing it further with the employee to find out if they simply need more time, their condition is preventing them from getting it done, or are concerned about revealing certain details of their condition. 

2. Forms aren’t submitted on time 

Once requested by an employer, an employee has 15 calendar days to submit medical certification forms. This is typically the case unless it’s simply not possible due to particular circumstances, despite an employee’s good faith effort to do so (if this is the case, the FMLA requires employers to extend this deadline.) To increase employee accountability and help reduce the risk of multiple extensions or leave abuse, you might consider asking an employee to explain (ideally in writing) what efforts they have taken to obtain the form, why they were unsuccessful, and when they expect to have it.

💡 Employees can submit medical certification and get notifications about deadlines to do so all in Cocoon. Cocoon also provides an automatic five-day grace period to help reduce potential operational friction arising from this exception. If no paperwork is submitted by day 21, the leave can be denied.

3. Forms are incomplete/insufficient

First, you must provide written notice to the employee that a form is incomplete or insufficient, explaining what data was missing, or what made it insufficient. From here, employees have seven calendar days to fix any issues. We’ll dive deeper into this issue in the last section of the blog.

💡 Cocoon can help you send and keep track of this correspondence and the updated certifications provided in the re-submission process. If more than seven days are needed, Cocoon can help you extend the deadline.

How closely will you review medical certifications?

Once successfully submitted, the next consideration is how thoroughly will you review the documentation? The level of scrutiny you choose to exercise may depend on the bandwidth of your People Ops team, the employee experience you’re aiming for, and your company culture and policies. Some approaches include:

Auto-approval

Once a completed form is submitted, it’s automatically approved regardless of the information in it. 

• Pros: fastest option, smoothest employee experience
• Cons: errors can slip through unnoticed, problems or questions might arise that could have been addressed sooner, approval of an unjustified leave 

Light touch

A form is reviewed quickly for completeness and generally approved unless there are clear issues. 

• Pros: balance ease with oversight, catch basic errors
• Cons: still might not catch problems or questions until later

Detailed review

People Ops reviews each form closely to ensure completeness, clarity, compliance, accuracy, and proactive planning.

• Pros: problems or questions immediately addressed, best for stricter absence management
• Cons: takes more HR bandwidth, requires familiarity in reviewing forms, employees might feel scrutinized

💡 You can review and approve forms directly from Cocoon with the level of depth you choose, from auto-approval to a full, detailed review.

What to look for when reviewing medical certification forms

So, your organization has decided to require medical certification forms, and doesn’t automatically approve a form upon submission… What information are you actually looking for on the forms?

1. Is the form complete and sufficient?

Here, you’re looking to make sure nothing was left blank, and that you have the needed information to qualify an employee for FMLA-protected leave. A form is considered incomplete if one or more entries haven’t been filled out. Sometimes all the information is there, but healthcare providers may put it in a different place, or have their own form. This can make reviews a bit more challenging.

A certification is considered insufficient when the form is complete, but the information is inconclusive, contradictory, or illegible. For example, an estimated leave range says “2-3 months” without specifying dates, or leave dates suggested by a doctor do not coincide with the leave dates requested (more on this below). 

As noted above, if forms are incomplete/insufficient, written notice must be provided that explains what’s missing or incorrect, and given an employee at least seven days to provide the information (or a time frame otherwise established in the written notice). If the follow-up information is never provided, or is not provided within a reasonable time frame, the leave may be denied.

💡When a form is marked insufficient or incomplete, Cocoon will prompt you to explain the deficiency, email that notice to an employee, and track the task and timeline for an employee to respond all directly in Cocoon.

2. Does the information establish that the employee has a qualified serious health condition?

The FMLA defines a ‘serious health condition' as “an illness, injury, impairment, or physical or mental condition that involves either inpatient care or continuing treatment by a healthcare provider, involving a period of incapacity that prevents them from being able to work.” Generally, there are six situations where an employee’s medical condition will qualify: 

1. They need inpatient care, getting admitted for an overnight stay in a hospital, hospice, or residential medical care facility.
2. They are/will be incapacitated and require treatment of more than three consecutive full calendar days (e.g., outpatient surgery, recovering from a major infection).
3. They are pregnant, and have medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth.
4. They have an ongoing chronic condition that requires two or more treatments on a regular basis or cause prolonged periods of illness (e.g., Crohn’s disease, migraines).
5. They have a permanent or long-term condition (e.g., cancer, dementia) that requires continuing supervision of a healthcare provider even if treatment isn’t actively administered.
6. They have a condition requiring multiple treatments (e.g., chemotherapy treatments, restorative surgeries).

When reviewing certifications, employers evaluate whether the information provided satisfies one or more of these six situations.

💡 Check out more specific of FMLA-qualifying conditions here. You can easily view the SHC form in Cocoon to ensure a healthcare provider has checked appropriate boxes or provided the information sufficient for you to conclude that the condition prompting the employee’s leave is indeed an FMLA-covered serious health condition. 

If the SHC form fails to indicate that they have an FMLA-qualifying condition, their leave may be denied. Employers cannot exercise independent judgment on this—they need to stick to what the form indicates, and what boxes are checked or not. In the case that an FMLA-protected leave is denied, an employee may still be eligible under your company’s leave policies, or for other leave accommodations. 

💡 Cocoon automatically sends required FMLA designation notices informing employees that their leave was denied because the FMLA does not apply to their request.

3. Are there leave date discrepancies?

Here, there are critical details you’ll want to pay attention to:

The leave period is unclear or imprecise

If a form says, “employee will need approximately 2-3 months of leave” what does that actually mean in practice? 60 or 90 business or calendar days? Beginning and ending upon which dates? 

The employee seeks more leave than the healthcare provider authorizes 

For example, if an employee is seeking leave from July 1-31, but the certification says leave is only needed from July 5-19, you could: 

1. Approve the full leave request (July 1-31).
2. Partially approve and send a deficiency notice telling the employee that they will need to provide an updated certification supporting the additional leave dates.
3. Only approve the leave dates the healthcare provider has authorized (July 5-19).

The employee seeks less leave than the healthcare provider authorizes 

Employers are prohibited from forcing employees to use more leave than they are seeking, but here you might want to partially approve and send a deficiency notice to determine what the employee wants. Essentially, the deficiency notice informs the employee of the leave date discrepancy and gives them an opportunity to update their leave request to match the healthcare provider’s certification. If the employee responds, approve the leave consistent with their wishes. If they don’t respond, then approve the leave for only the period of time originally requested. 

4. Does the request entail intermittent or reduced schedule leave?

If an employee requests leave on an intermittent or reduced schedule leave, the certification must establish the medical necessity for it, and provide a best estimate of the dates and duration of treatments. For conditions that might result in unforeseeable episodes of incapacity (e.g., flare-ups from chronic physical or mental serious health conditions like: back ailments, migraine headaches, depression, anxiety, asthma, pre- or post-natal medical complications), healthcare providers must estimate the frequency or duration of these episodes, with the understanding that they can change and need periodic revisions.

5. Forms are complete and sufficient, but you need further authentication or clarification

Sometimes a form has the required information, but still raises questions. An employer cannot contact a healthcare provider to request additional information, but an HR professional or leave administrator (not a manager or supervisor) can contact the healthcare provider to authenticate or clarify a certification. 

• Authentication is when you are confirming that the healthcare provider was the one who actually completed and authorized the form. Submit a copy of the certification in question and request the verification from the healthcare provider.
• Clarification is when you cannot understand what is written either because it’s illegible or needs further explanation. Submit a copy of the certification and ask the healthcare provider about the section(s) that need clarification. 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule must be followed when personal health information of an employee is shared with an employer by a healthcare provider; an employee has to authorize the release of this information to you as their employer. Should an employee choose not to authorize its release, and they don’t otherwise clarify the certification, you may deny the FMLA leave if the certification remains unclear.

6. Do you want or need a second opinion? A third opinion?

If an employer still has reason to doubt the validity of a medical certification, they may require the employee to obtain a second option, but at the employer’s expense. An employer is able to designate the healthcare provider of their choice to provide the second opinion. 

However, the healthcare provider in question cannot: 

• Be employed on a regular basis by the employer
• Regularly contract with them the employer
• Have their services utilized regularly by the employer (except in areas where access to healthcare is extremely limited and only one or two specialists are in the vicinity).

In the event that the opinions of the employee and employer’s designated healthcare providers differ, the employer may require the employee to obtain certification from a third provider (again at the employer’s expense). The third opinion is final and binding. The third provider must be designated or jointly approved by the employer and employee, both of them acting in good faith to reach an agreement upon the third provider. If the employer does not attempt in good faith to reach agreement, the employer will be bound by the first certification. If the employee does not attempt in good faith to reach agreement, the employee will be bound by the second certification.

The bottom line

While this guide does its best to break down the medical certification form process and troubleshooting it, we know it can still be overwhelming for People Ops reviewing SHC forms, and for employees trying to submit them. That’s exactly why leave management software like Cocoon was created—to help you codify and document the policies, processes, deadlines, and submissions surrounding a medical leave request, for a smoother employee experience, with lighter work- and stress-loads for all. If you’re ready to see what this could look like for your organization, give it a whirl. If not, we’ll always be here with guides and checklists to help you through it.

Today we're thrilled to announce Cocoon Leave Planning, our standalone leave planning solution designed for insurance carriers, third-party administrators (TPAs), and employers to support employees planning for any leave type—parental, medical, caregiver, and beyond.

Cocoon has transformed the leave planning experience for employees since our launch in 2021. In fact, leave planning was the first product we built after hearing how employees struggled to understand their time and pay across different sources—from federal and state entitlements to state or private insurance and employer policies. Hundreds of customers use Cocoon Leave Planning to give their employees the seamless experience they deserve.

Until now, Cocoon has offered Leave Planning bundled with our Leave Management solution. Today, we’re excited to offer Cocoon Leave Planning as a standalone product that seamlessly integrates with your existing systems.

What is Cocoon Leave Planning?

Cocoon Leave Planning is a self-serve tool for employees to understand their leave options, including all available time and pay across multiple sources. Employees considering leave to start a family, handle a medical situation, care for a family member, and a multitude of other reasons shouldn’t have to navigate the complexity of regulations and policies. With Cocoon Leave Planning, employees can plan a leave within minutes with clarity about the options available to them. 

Here’s what an employee can expect:

• An accurate & complete leave plan: Cocoon’s technology instantly assesses eligibility across all entitlements and employer and insurance policies. Employees have a comprehensive view that incorporates all relevant time and pay sources, including leave history—ensuring they see an accurate picture of their benefits. All in one place.‍
• Intuitive and personalized leave planning: With Cocoon Leave Planning, employees can plan a leave within minutes and experiment with different options to design the plan that’s right for them. As employees plan their leave, their projected time and pay adjust in real-time for ultimate clarity.
• Unmatched policy coverage: Cocoon supports all leave types—parental, medical, caregiver, personal, and more. We accommodate a wide variety of employer and insurance policies. This means we can support employees in planning accurate leave plans whatever policies you may have. ‍
• A seamless integration experience: Cocoon Leave Planning integrates seamlessly with your systems across HRIS, insurance, and leave management. Our solution can even facilitate private and state insurance claim filing for a smooth process in accessing benefits.

See how it works for yourself

The impact of Cocoon Leave Planning 

Over the past year we’ve witnessed increasing demand from carriers and TPAs who want to provide a modern leave planning solution for their clients, as well as from employers who want to augment an existing leave management solution (whether homegrown or purchased) with better leave planning. This demand stems from the fundamental challenge with leave: time and pay benefits are exceedingly difficult to navigate for the very employees they’re designed to help. Solving this is a win-win-win for employees, employers, and carriers and TPAs.

Increase client satisfaction & retention 

Solving a significant pain point for employees creates a ripple effect of satisfaction—employees who can easily navigate their leave options feel more valued and supported. This translates directly to enhanced client relationships for carriers and TPAs, because employers are seeing a direct and positive impact on their workforce. Stronger client relationships mean a stickier book of business for carriers and TPAs who offer this solution.

Patricia Do, People Ops Manager at Baggu, shared about Cocoon Leave Planning: "[The employee] loved that she could visualize her leave, tweaking it as she went to make the best decision. That was never possible before." This is the same exceptional experience carriers and TPAs can now offer their customers.

Dramatically reduce administrative burden

85% of employees use Cocoon Leave Planning completely self-serve with no additional support needed, creating significant time savings across your organization. Instead of getting caught in endless back-and-forth communications between employees, HR teams, and the teams managing leaves at carriers and TPAs, you can refocus on other work while providing a better experience for everyone involved. HR teams report spending half as much time managing leaves with Cocoon, and have offloaded up to 95% of their leave management administrative work.

Improve return to work outcomes

A smooth leave journey drives employee retention and return-to-work outcomes. Having a clear leave plan increases the likelihood that an employee returns to work at the expected time. 73% of employees using Cocoon Leave Planning return on the expected date. A clear leave plan directly influences long-term workforce predictability.

Stay competitive

In today's benefits landscape, enabling employees to plan leave with ease isn't just nice-to-have—it's table stakes. Requests for Proposals (RFPs) increasingly include leave planning capabilities as a mandatory requirement, not an optional feature. 74% of customers using Cocoon consider it a "must-have tool.” Offering a differentiated solution like Cocoon Leave Planning positions you ahead of competitors still relying on incomplete solutions that lack the clarity employees need.

The future of leave is here, join us

The market is evolving—the difference between leading carriers and TPAs will be defined by the technology they provide. Lead this transformation with Cocoon Leave Planning. We’ve already transformed the experience for hundreds of companies and can’t wait to partner with carriers, TPAs, and employers who share our vision for a better leave experience.

Get a demo today →

Challenge: Baggu managed leaves across spreadsheets and slideshows, leaving People Ops managers anxious about their accuracy across more leaves in more states as the company began to grow.

Solution: Implementing Cocoon in just three weeks, Baggu can scale leave management, automate their compliance, and offer employees flexibility and visibility into the leave management process they never had before.

Results:

• Reduced leave management time from 3+ hours to 30 minutes per leave.
• Automated employer compliance features pay calculations and compliance, reducing human error.
• Improved employee experience with self-serve leave planning and automated pay calculations.
• Fast implementation—live within three weeks to support an upcoming leave.
• Centralized documentation for easy access and fewer lost files.

Meet Baggu’s People Ops team

As a small company trying to make a big impact, Baggu began crafting durable, reusable bags in 2007. Though that vision has expanded across more products and the teammates who bring them to life, Baggu is still committed to minimizing waste, maximizing delight, and long-term sustainability. 

For Baggu’s People Ops team, long-term sustainability meant rethinking their processes and tooling to offer a scalable employee experience as Baggu continued to grow. One day, as Senior Director of People Ops, Ben Seltzer, began to train up People Ops Manager, Patricia Do, on Baggu’s in-house leave management process across slideshows and spreadsheets, all Patricia could think was, “I hope I don’t actually have to use this,” and began looking for a leave management solution.

Choosing a leave management solution

It wasn’t just the manual processes making Patricia wary. “Ben created valuable resources for employees taking leave, but when it came to calculating pay, taking state benefits into account—and in which state—actually mapping it all out was confusing. I was worried I would make a mistake,” Patricia says. “Plus, Baggu is growing and scaling. It’s hard enough doing this manual process once a year, but when it suddenly quadruples, there’s so much that can go wrong. Messing up someone’s leave would be the worst.”

Though Baggu had just implemented Rippling as their HRIS—which has an exclusive integration contract with a Cocoon competitor for leave management—Ben still encouraged Patricia to evaluate her options and check out Cocoon. He’d looked at them in the past and wanted to see how they had evolved in the years since. 

Ben’s hunch proved to be spot on. On the surface, it would have been easy to keep everything inside Rippling, but as Baggu actually evaluated Cocoon vs. Tilt, Patricia and Ben realized that Tilt lacked a key feature that put a damper on the seeming convenience. “We realized that Cocoon was the only solution that would handle and automate the employer compliance portion. Even though Tilt’s integration with Rippling made certain pieces more convenient, worrying about continuing to file physical paperwork, and not taking on certain compliance pieces on our behalf, we thought Cocoon was the better route to take in the long-run.”

Cocoon’s fast and simple implementation process

Baggu began conversations with Cocoon in late 2024, and signed in January of 2025. By early February, Cocoon’s implementation went live. “We had someone taking leave very soon, so I asked to expedite the implementation timeline, and our reps, Dom and Victoria, delivered in just three weeks. Having just implemented a new HRIS, we were prepared for a lot more time and complexity, so it was a relief that we just had to fill out a few forms and checklists and Cocoon took care of the rest.” 

An automated solution for a people-centric future

Though it’s barely been a month with Cocoon, Patricia already sees there’s a lot to love. “It’s so nice to be able to trust in a platform that’s already wired to calculate and automate complex stuff—and not rely on manual, human calculations,” Patricia explains, relieved. “It’s also a relief that all the documents live inside of Cocoon, so everything employees submit is already there and nothing gets lost.”

Patricia estimates that Cocoon has reduced the time People Ops has to dedicate to the leave management process down from 3+ hours per leave down to 30 minutes. “It will allow me to focus more on my work around hiring practices and compensation packages, and ultimately just reduces a lot of the anxiety I had around managing leaves in-house.”

Cocoon is also proving to be a hit with employees. “We did a walkthrough with an employee using Cocoon, and she loved that she could visualize her leave, tweaking it as she went to make the best decision, and getting things estimated before even officially requesting leave. That was never possible before.” “Plus,” Patricia adds, “as we hire more People Operations managers, and grow the team in general, I think Cocoon will be a huge selling point to show that we’re not only investing in software that makes our work better and our lives easier, but also committed to providing the best employee experience possible.” 

Team Cocoon is fresh off our company-wide offsite in Cancun, slightly sunburnt, and excited to share some big developments we’ve been working on for several months. This month we’re all about customization, a key component of our vision to transform the leave experience with technology and great design. 

Unveiling our tech-powered leave experience for Managers 

Leave management is a team sport, which means your leave solution needs to play nicely with your HR team and managers. That’s why we were excited to announce our new Manager Dashboard last month that gives managers the visibility they need to support their teams through leave—removing you and other People team members as a bottleneck.  

Managers now have access to their own Cocoon Dashboard with details into their direct reports' leave timelines, plus access to a dedicated resource library with templates and guidance.

We sat down with members of the Cocoon Product Team to hear more about how we built this prioritizing customer feedback around simplicity and privacy. 

I’m excited about this launch because it’s part of a larger, ongoing effort to truly tailor the Cocoon experience to all the different roles and functions that may touch a leave, giving them the information they need when they need it.”
_{- Sean Miller, Cocoon Product Manager}

Meet the Leaves tab you’ve been dreaming of

Our (belated) Valentine’s Day gift to you this year: several highly-requested updates to the Leaves tab in your Cocoon Dashboard that give you more visibility at-a-glance and help you report on all leaves with even more granularity. After a little glow-up, this page now includes:

• A search bar to look up any employee
• The ability to filter by leave type 
• Labels for leave cadence (“Continuous” or “Intermittent”)
• Helpful tooltips and flags, e.g. important documents an employee needs to upload

Also—as part of this release, our Insights feature is getting its very own page that you can find on the nav bar (they grow up so fast!) Log in to your Cocoon Dashboard to see it IRL.

Small changes, big impact

As always, we can’t neglect to highlight some smaller but (we think!) equally important product releases.

1. Self-serve FAQ editing: This one is a small but very mighty update. Workspace Admins can now easily edit the FAQ employees see in their Cocoon Dashboard. Learn how to do it here.
2. Easier leave date selection for employees: We heard from employees that the experience for updating leave dates was confusing….So we updated it. To edit a leave plan, employees can now choose any dates on the calendar and Cocoon will automatically validate that they’re in line with laws and your policies. If any of the selected time is not covered, we’ll tell the employee exactly how many days they need to remove from their date range and explain why.
3. Streamlined recertification requests: For intermittent medical or caregiver leaves, that require employer review, Workspace Admins can now easily request new or updated serious health condition forms (known as a “recertification”) with a couple clicks. Cocoon will automatically notify the employee, and let you know when they’ve uploaded the new document to fix any deficiencies. 

Coming soon: A new era of customization in Cocoon with bespoke leave approval flows

We’re kickstarting our customization era with new functionality that allows People teams to choose exactly which leave requests (if any) they want to review themselves, and which they want Cocoon’s software to handle for them. Here’s the scoop:

• In Settings, Cocoon Admins can choose to toggle “Leave adjudication” on or off per leave type: parental (disability and bonding), medical (continuous and intermittent), and caregiver (continuous and intermittent)
• Turning adjudication on allows you to review each leave request and approve it, deny it, or request additional information from the employees. 
• Cocoon walks you through the process with step-by-step guidance and automated employee communications.
• Don’t want to take on this work? No problem—adjudication is off by default, meaning Cocoon will handle these decisions for you with our unique processes per leave type. 

This functionality has been a top request from partners and prospective partners for several months now, and we’re excited to see it out in the wild. Check out how it works firsthand with this interactive demo.

Coming soon: More leaves, not more problems

Cocoon knows leave is not one-sized-fits-all. We think about the edge cases, and are building software to make those moments as smooth as possible for both People teams and employees. Cocoon has created a streamlined experience for employees who need to take multiple leaves. This new functionality makes it easy for employees to plan additional leaves, or plan two simultaneous leaves for different qualifying reasons. People teams: as always, we’ve got you covered—Cocoon handles compliance and makes it easy to track and see details for each leave in your Cocoon Dashboard.

‍

No two companies or teams operate identically. Cocoon is proud to continue to push the boundaries on tech-powered leave management, this time with unparalleled customization for how your team wants to handle leave reviews and approvals, support for multiple leaves, easy self-serve editing to the information your employees see in Cocoon. Have feedback on what else you’d like to customize within Cocoon? Reach out to support@cocoon.com—we’d love to hear from you!

With the holidays now behind us, there’s still one more gift for you: we’re unveiling the highly requested Manager Dashboard to give managers better visibility into key leave details for their employees. We spoke with Product Designer, Estell Kim, and Product Manager, Sean Miller to learn more about what this feature does, why we built it, and how it helps both our customers and our platform continue to evolve and improve the way leave gets managed.

What is the Manager Dashboard?

The Manager Dashboard is a focused view just for managers offering key details about their direct reports’ leaves, including: leave type, dates, status, and a list of past, present, and upcoming leaves. They’ll also have easy access to resources to help them better support employees through a leave. People Ops teams benefit from this view too—you won’t have to be in the middle answering questions about essential leave details. 

From a design perspective, we wanted it to reflect the overall ease of using Cocoon with everything where you expect and need it to be. We also wanted to ensure privacy and control, so managers can only see certain details, and only for their employees. Admins can toggle manager access on or off and track who’s logged in to keep tabs on accounts and usage.

Leave is a team sport that goes beyond HR and a leave-taker. In offering managers more resources in Cocoon that are easy to access, we can help them focus their time and energy toward supporting a leave-taker.”

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Why we built the Manager Dashboard

This feature was born straight out of customer feedback and research led by our Product team. “Admins told us that, on the one hand, managers needed more than reminder emails from Cocoon, and that having People Ops in the middle for certain questions was slowing everybody down. But on the other hand, they didn’t want to give managers too much information or something that required a lot of training,” Estell explains. 

“Our solution was to develop a Manager Dashboard by leveraging census data to establish a relationship between managers and their direct reports, providing enhanced visibility and greater autonomy,” Sean adds. “Managers can plan effectively before, during, and after an employee’s leave with this self-serve option that has just the right amount of detail.”

“We also wanted to address the patchwork of solutions that non-Cocoon customers rely on today—emails, spreadsheets, too many meetings, and generally scattered processes,” Estell says. “With this additional dashboard, we’re offering an even more seamless, out-of-the-box solution that reduces manual effort and improves communication across the board for seasoned Cocoon customers or those just getting started.”

How does the Manager Dashboard work?

“We prioritize evolving alongside our customers, adapting to their needs, and simplifying things for them,” Sean proudly proclaims. “The Manager Dashboard is straightforward to use, and reduces friction for both managers and People Teams by removing Cocoon Admins as a bottleneck to get key info on employees’ leaves .” Here’s how it works:

When managers log in, they’ll see a focused Leaves tab in the left sidebar. This tab will show them:

1. A list of employees with any past, present, and upcoming leaves
2. Leave type, leave dates, and leave status
3. A link at the top with tips and templates for managers supporting an employee and team through a leave.

From here, they can click on any employee’s name to dive deeper into leave details like:

1. Leave timeline details
2. The laws or policies that cover each segment
3. If their leave is paid, and from which sources 

For Workspace Admins

Workspace Admins are the folks who manage your organization’s use of and access to Cocoon. They have the ability to invite and activate managers and new employees who will use Cocoon—so make sure they’re aware of this update!

• When you integrate your HRIS or provide us with census data, Cocoon automatically matches managers to their direct reports, so you don’t have to do this manually. 
• In the Settings menu, you can see which managers have created an account, confirm their teammates are properly assigned, and turn manager account access on or off. 

Today’s launch, tomorrow’s improvements

“Leave is a team sport that goes beyond HR and a leave-taker,” Estell says. “In offering managers more resources in Cocoon that are easy to access, we can help them focus their time and energy toward supporting a leave-taker.”

“I’m excited about this launch because it’s part of a larger, ongoing effort to truly tailor the Cocoon experience to all the different roles and functions that may touch a leave, giving them the information they need when they need it,” Sean says. “Looking to the future, this work will help us to continue to improve efficiency, flexibility, and transparency as your organization grows, and as Cocoon grows, too.”

In short, at Cocoon, we’re excited to keep improving the leave management process for everyone who’s a part of the journey. To keep doing just that, in 2025, we’re planning to launch roles in Cocoon for HR business partners—so stay tuned!

Being motivated by a desire to help others, inspired by the opportunity to build a great culture, and up to the challenge of helping employees and organizations evolve are some of the special ingredients that make for a great People Ops teammate. While some folks start in HR straight away, others come into it after a life experience that pushes them to want to help others—often in a way they themselves were not. It’s what drove our founders to start Cocoon, and how our leave champion, J, came to her current role as a Benefits Program Manager. J is a powerful example of someone who translated both her positive experiences and struggles in life (and on leave) into concrete solutions, policies, and processes to ensure others would be better supported and equipped to face what the real world and their work life presented. 

Meet J on her search for joy

From a young age, J knew the importance of being there for her family, and that good health wasn’t something to be taken for granted–that’s because J took leave to care for her mother who eventually lost her battle with breast cancer when J was only 23. “When you lose someone that you love so much, it really changes your perspective on life. I started questioning what my purpose was. I realized life was really short and asked myself if I was doing exactly what I wanted to do? Was it bringing me joy?” Upon reflecting, she realized that she wanted to make a bold change, trying her hand at a career in fashion. She stayed in the fast-paced industry for a decade before realizing it was time to switch it up again—this time by starting a family.

“When I got pregnant with my daughter, I remembered that life lesson of how short life was and I knew I didn’t want to miss a single day with her. So I resigned and shifted all that purpose and energy into being a mom and just absolutely loved it.” Adding a son into the mix a few years later, J made each day with her young family count. As her kids grew, J started dabbling in part-time work, once again, asking herself what brought her joy. “I knew I didn’t want to go back to fashion, which was too much travel and intensity,” J says. “I realized, you know, I’m really passionate about helping people. I also really enjoyed the project management side of my work, so that’s when it clicked for me that HR roles worked well with my personal and professional needs.”

She made the full transition back when a part-time role turned into a full-time gig in 2018. Though she had taken on a lot of HR generalist work, she always enjoyed roles focused on leave and benefits most, because they made her feel the impact of her work directly. This eventually led her to become a Benefits Program Manager at a B2C SaaS EdTech company with around 250 employees across the US and Canada. With a team of three, J had a lot on her plate, but it was about to overflow…

From leave admin to leave taker 

In mid-2022, J and her husband were thrown for the loop of their lives as they were both diagnosed with cancer within weeks of each other. Knowing her higher risk for breast cancer, J had always been vigilant about prevention and detection, catching it at an early stage. For her husband, a triathlete unknowingly hosting a growing tumor in his abdomen, however, the diagnosis and treatment were more dire. “I had just enough time to schedule my own surgery, have time to recover, and then get ready to take care of my husband as he underwent his treatment and recovery for what would end up being almost a full year.” 

J ended up taking two leaves: first, a medical leave for her own recovery, then a caregiver leave while her husband underwent treatment. This compounded the complexity, not only having to navigate two types of leave, but doing so while working through her own health problems before turning around to help her husband in his recovery—and with little time to plan and process it all. It didn’t help that her first leave with a different leave administrator went awry. 

“We had one leave rep through our provider to handle everything. They often took too long to respond, or just didn’t respond at all. On top of that, they would send inaccurate manual payroll files, so we wasted a lot of time double-checking and sending files back,” J explains. “I had administered leaves, knew what problems people tended to encounter, so I thought I had a slight upper hand at navigating my own leave. But when you experience it first-hand, it’s even more challenging than you could ever imagine. And it’s downright scary when you don’t know your pay amount or timelines.” The final straw for J came when the leave admin miscommunicated her return date to her manager by eight weeks, causing chaos at work and home. “I just thought, there's no way I could let this happen to anybody else,” J asserts.

Luckily, even before J had taken her first leave, the Benefits team was already in talks about how they could improve the leave experience, cut ties with their outsourced leave provider, and Cocoon was slated as the top option to replace it. “My experience made me even more compassionate for people going on leave, and often not under happy circumstances, and dealing with it all. And now I was in a position to make a difference for them, to ensure nobody else would have to go through what I went through,” J reaffirms.

A sunnier horizon on the road to recovery

Though she didn’t have much time after returning from her medical leave before beginning her caregiver leave, J and her team lined up the pieces enough that she could use Cocoon to plan and manage her caregiver leave. This time around with Cocoon, it felt like night and day compared to the first leave experience. Cocoon gave her the peace of mind she needed about submitting paperwork, pay, and timelines so she could focus on caring for her husband on his long road to recovery.

Unfortunately, her husband’s employer didn’t have Cocoon, and they struggled trying to figure out what to do about disability payments that weren’t coming, until J realized Cocoon could still come to the rescue. “My husband wasn’t receiving disability payments, nobody from the EDD was getting back to us, his HR team wasn’t very helpful, so I started poking around in Cocoon to figure out how to contact the EDD,” J explains. “There was an article that explained the process and even gave tips to get through, like which hours are the best to call. It was incredible.” 

Cocoon gave J such a clear sense of the process, that upon returning to work, she had ideas on how to keep improving the leave process for everyone. “Without the manual processes and overall administrative burden of our previous provider, we could finally work on how our organization could craft more intentional and realistic transition plans to help employees ramp back up after leave. We also started drafting two additional leave policies to complement the parental and disability leave we already had.” 

Without the manual processes and overall administrative burden of our previous provider, we could finally work on how our organization could craft more intentional and realistic transition plans to help employees ramp back up after leave.” 

A leave management experience that keeps getting better

Having now been a Cocoon customer for over two years and managing dozens of leaves in Cocoon, J says the complaints they used to hear from leave-takers about their rep have dried up. “In the People Ops world, when we don’t hear anything from employees, we know that things are going well,” J laughs. “For the Benefits team, we’ve reduced our need to oversee the process by at least 50%, and we don’t keep getting stuck in the middle. We have confidence in Cocoon, and don’t need to spend all that time auditing payroll and trying to get a hold of someone. When we do have questions, we get a timely response that makes sense and offers solutions. And I know first-hand how important that is.”

J also appreciates that the Cocoon experience is always improving and evolving. “In our calls with Mike (J’s Customer Success Manager), he always asks what’s working, what’s not, and to have someone with that kind of attitude is so different. And it isn’t just talk—I constantly see how Cocoon listens and makes improvements. I know Cocoon is keeping an eye on our needs and thinking about the future. This approach fits really well with the ethos of our culture, and is reassuring for the leave industry which desperately needs more of it.” 

With her a clean bill of health for herself and her husband, J also rests assured about how she can play her part in helping others overcome the obstacles they face on a leave, or sidestep them entirely by relying on Cocoon. As someone who has pondered, chased, and redefined her purpose, J knows that “when I can help somebody, I find joy and fulfillment in that. I know that what I’m doing matters to someone else, and also to me… and nothing is more important than that.” We couldn’t agree more, J. 

It’s full steam ahead for Team Cocoon as we wrap up 2024. Before we close our laptops for our company-wide Winter Recharge Week (sidenote: highly recommend this), we’ll be busy at work to release more functionality that helps People teams manage leave a little more smoothly. This month, we’re excited to share what we’ve built along the themes of customization, seamless access across multiple Cocoon accounts, and more.

Customize how your company holidays impact leave time

‘Tis the season for more customization in Cocoon. Our Product Team is definitely on the nice list this year for tackling another top request from our community: including holidays in leave calculations. Cocoon Admins can now easily add their company holidays and shutdowns into Cocoon so we can calculate time balances accordingly if they overlap with an employee’s leave. And, you can customize how you want us to handle pay per employee type for any paid leaves. See how it works below.

Multiple entities, one Admin login

More company entities should not mean more problems. Cocoon Admins at companies with multiple entities can now easily access each entity’s dashboard with a one login with a single click, giving you seamless visibility into the full picture of your company’s leaves. Simply log in with your standard work email and use the nav bar to toggle between them. That’s right—no more time spent logging in and out or using jane+doe+300***@company.com as your email.  

Coming soon: A better experience for People teams who take leave

It can be easy to forget that People leaders need to take leave sometimes, too. Starting next month, any Cocoon Admin who also has an employee account will be able to easily switch back and forth between their employee and Admin Dashboards without ever leaving Cocoon. And did we mention we’re building a dedicated dashboard for managers for visibility into their team’s leaves? Down the road, this ability to easily switch between accounts will also apply to Managers who plan their own leaves in Cocoon. Stay tuned for updates in January!

Small changes, big impact

Some launches are flashier than others, but smaller improvements stack up over time to make a real impact to the overall experience for both People teams and employees. Our team is always hard at work to make incremental changes based on our community’s needs. Here are a few recent small but mighty updates we made:

• Reminders for employees to verify benefits payments:  We know how critical it is to verify that employees are paid correctly. Based on your feedback, we added a task to employees’ “My tasks” Dashboard to use our Benefits Verification Tool. All they need to do is enter dates and amounts from one benefits check and we’ll instantly verify whether the daily rate they received matches the rate in our system. With this update, they can easily *check* that task off the to-do list ;)
• Growing into eligibility based on tenure: Compliance is our bread and butter. As of next month, Cocoon’s system will automatically detect if an employee hits an FMLA tenure requirement during a leave, and will instantly trigger all relevant updates from there: send relevant compliance notices, update employees’ leave timelines, and enable them plan additional leave time based on their new eligibility. A small but mighty win for reliable, tech-powered leave.

Have feedback or thoughts on anything above? Feel free to share them directly with our Product Marketer, Libby Buttenwieser, at product-feedback@cocoon.com. Otherwise, we’ll see you back here in 2025 with a lot more updates to share!

"Paid leave pays off" is more than just clever copywriting and Cocoon’s vision for leave—it’s a conclusion we’ve come to again and again having helped our customers manage over 10,000 leaves, seeing first hand the impact paid leave makes. But we know nobody can speak to that better than employees themselves. That’s why our team partnered up with Parentaly and the Chamber of Mothers to craft a survey to understand the impact of paid leave (or the lack thereof). Paired with the results of our annual benchmark survey, you have access to rich datasets to: see what a competitive policy is, understand the benefits of having one, and make a case to update yours accordingly. We know that compassionate, competitive employers go further and get better results, but now you can see why for yourself!

Key takeaways

Though we encourage you to explore all the findings below, these were the top three that stood out for us:

1. Paid leave is a must-have. 60% of respondents said lack of a competitive paid leave package would be a deal breaker when considering a new job.
2. Paid leave outranks most other benefits. Potential job seekers ranked a competitive paid leave package as their #2 priority (a hair more important than even a competitive salary), with 100% covered health insurance being #1.
3. Paid leave impacts retention. 56% say a poor leave package was a reason they left their job, while 70% say a generous paid leave package would make them stay.

The business case for offering paid leave

Over 1,300 respondents nationwide took our survey (with the vast majority sourced randomly). Across this set of questions, we sought to understand how access to competitive paid leave policies impacts recruiting and retention.

60% say access to paid leave would be a deal-breaker in considering a new job; 56% say a poor leave package was a factor in deciding to leave a job

When it comes to recruiting and retention, not offering paid leave is a dealbreaker. Surprisingly, it’s sometimes doing as much or more heavy lifting than compensation: when we asked respondents to rank the importance of benefits, access to paid leave was ranked #2 overall—just a hair above even a competitive salary! (Number one was 100% paid health insurance.) Nearly half said they would take a pay cut to work with a company with a better paid leave package. 

Based on how unnecessarily confusing and frustrating my first leave was… I would need to forgo my dream of a very-much-wanted second child if I stay at my current company.”

I would like to have a third baby, but will have to look for another job with better leave before we do.” 

70% say a generous paid leave package would make them stay at their current employer

Paid leave can be a huge factor in keeping new parents in the workforce overall, which in turn helps them support their families and grow their careers. It’s also a good deal for employers who can spend up to double a former employee’s salary to replace them. When an employee knows they’re being taken care of in their moment of need, they return the favor by staying on with their supportive employer.

My husband has 18 weeks of paid leave through his employer and will literally never leave.”

I’ve taken paid parental leave twice and it was instrumental to my physical healing and mental capacity to get back to work at full productivity.”

58% say they would take unpaid leave if there was no company policy

Though this may be a favor in point of naysayers (“why pay for it if they’d take it unpaid?”), we think this speaks to the dire necessity of access to paid leave so employees can take the time they need to care for themselves and/or their loved ones in some of life’s most challenging moments. Leave will happen whether you have a policy or not, and we think it’s better to be prepared.

I took paid parental leave and unpaid leave following that where I was pushed out of my role, denied my annual bonus, and opportunities for advancement. That, on top of postpartum anxiety and depression, has had a significant impact on my life.”

Access, understanding, and satisfaction

This set of questions helped us understand what kind of leave respondents do or don’t have access to, and how satisfied with it they are.

Only 43% are satisfied with the process of taking leave

Though 71% of respondents were content with their access to leave, less than half were satisfied with the process of taking it. This could suggest policies might look good on paper, but when an employee goes to plan and manage their leave, the experience takes a turn for the worse. Companies should not only train and educate employees on their policies, but also provide them the tools to effectively take advantage of the policies.

I work at a company with a ‘somewhat generous’ paid leave policy… but HR is perpetually confused at how to apply our policy and state programs, and doesn’t seem to care to learn more to actually help employees. Some of my colleagues have even been given completely incorrect information meant for employees based in other states… I dread the stress involved with navigating our leave policies.”

The gender gap shows up in leave, too

Unsurprisingly, more males have access to paid leave, with 86% saying their employers offer it, while only 59% of females’ do. In general, the higher your wage, the better your access to paid leave. When males aren’t satisfied with the amount of paid leave they’re given, they’re also more likely to leave a job: 68% of males say it has impacted their decision to leave, versus only 42% of females. 

Though 77% of males say they’re very comfortable taking full advantage of their company’s paid leave policy, 50% of them also said they thought doing so would impact their career progression. Women are less comfortable using their company’s leave policy (60%), but only 19% are concerned about the career impact it could have. Given the gender and class dynamics at work when it comes to access and use of paid leave, more work needs to be done to provide equitable access to leave, inside of a culture that promotes taking leave for whomever needs it. 

Best practices for employers

1. Improve your recruitment efforts and employee retention by offering paid leave. Tap our free resources to help you draft parental, medical, caregiver, and compassionate leave policies. Check out our paid leave benchmarking data to help you determine policy length.
2. Make employees feel comfortable to take leave. Educate employees, managers, and People Ops so they can properly navigate your policies. Provide tools like Cocoon that simplify and automate the hardest parts of leave, where friction and problems can arise. Establish the kind of culture that makes anyone feel safe and supported to take a leave, and confident about what will happen when they come back.
3. Provide equitable access to leave. Craft your policies with the needs of any employee in mind–not just people you “think” will take leave, or based on the exact employee population you have today. You also reduce complexity if everybody is offered the same thing, while future-proofing your policies as you grow and expand operations.

The U.S. is the only OECD member country—and one of only six countries in the world—without a national paid parental leave policy. This puts the burden on employers and state governments to figure out an offering, which could explain why 84% of US employers are planning on changing their leave policies in the next two years. That’s why we offer our annual paid leave benchmark report to help you set competitive baselines (and even help you craft policy language with our generators). Increasingly, competitive paid leave policies are table stakes for employee recruitment and retention, making this data more timely than ever.

This year, we offer paid leave policy insights with data from more than 250 companies across more than 12 industries for parental, medical, and caregiver leaves. In this blog, we’ll cover the top highlights, but you can visualize the data on our dashboard, or by downloading the full dataset below.

Tenure benchmarks 

While FMLA-protected leaves have hard and fast tenure requirements (working full-time for a covered employer for 12+ months and logging at least 1,250 hours), our benchmarks show that only 5-10% of companies have tenure requirements for 12+ months, and a majority don’t have tenure requirements at all. If you and another company offer the same amount of paid leave time, but have different tenure requirements, that’s a factor employees consider. Here’s how tenure requirements shake out:

• 52% of companies offering paid parental leave don’t have tenure requirement
• 79% of companies offering paid medical leave don’t have tenure requirement
• 81% of companies offering paid caregiver leave don’t have tenure requirement

💡 Interestingly, the median employee tenure at companies with paid parental leave policies is 20% longer than those without, supporting the idea that paid leave does pay off.

Overall leave policy median benchmarks

Below we share median policy lengths across paid parental, medical, and caregiver leaves, with insights by company size and industry. 

💡 If you don’t yet have a paid parental, medical, and/or caregiver policy, or are looking to update yours, try our free policy generators. 

Parental leave

With only 27% of US private-sector workers overall having access to paid parental leave, and over four million Americans taking an FMLA-protected parental leave each year, the need for paid parental leave is dire. That makes these 2024 metrics reassuring:

• Median birthing parental leave policy: 16 weeks
• Median non-birthing parental leave policy: 12 weeks
• 97% of employers in our data set have a paid parental leave policy (up 2% from 2023).
• Since 2021, parental leave policy lengths for birthing and non-birthing parents have increased nearly 25% across our benchmark data.
• Company size and industry insights:
  • Leading industries for birthing parental leave policies: media, capital markets, engineering/manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals—offering a more generous 18-24 weeks.
  • For non-birthing parental leave policies, the media industry bumps down to an 8 week median, where specialty retail also sits.
  • Smaller companies, with 11-50 employees, also bump down to 14.25 weeks for birthing parental leave policies, while all others held at 16 weeks.

Medical leave

Though parental leave has more coverage, when it comes to those taking an FMLA-protected leave, 55% use it for taking care of their own medical condition. This year, we found that a smaller percentage of employers offered a paid medical leave, which we think is more reflective of adding more companies to the dataset that simply don’t have medical policies versus employers revoking them. 

• Median medical leave policy: 6 weeks
• Since 2022, median medical leave offering is up 76% (up to 6 weeks from 3.4 weeks).
• 46% of employers in our data set have a paid medical leave policy (down 12% from last year).
• Company size and industry insights:
  • Leading industries for longer medical leave policies include: pharmaceuticals, engineering/manufacturing, healthcare services, media, and consumer services, offering anywhere from 7-12 weeks.
  • Mid-sized companies and beyond (250+ employees) see a boost in their median medical leave to 8 weeks.

Caregiver leave

Across the US, the need for caregiver leave is on the rise—with 22% of US adults working full time and providing caregiving (up 21% since 2015). Though this is the least common paid leave policy, it’s also gained traction throughout the years in our benchmark reports.

• Median caregiver policy: 6 weeks 
• 24% of employers surveyed have a paid caregiver leave policy (up 15% from 2023).
• Company size and industry insights:
  • Leading industries for longer caregiver leave policies include: pharmaceuticals and capital markets, offering up to 12 weeks.
  • Companies 11-50 employees offer just a bit more caregiver leave at 8 weeks.
  • While the overall median is 6 weeks, the most generous policies range from 12-16 weeks.

💡Not sure where to start with caregiver leave? Learn why you need a policy, and try our free caregiver leave policy generator. 

The bottom line

Though we’re still working towards our long-term vision where every working person can afford to take the time they need during life’s pivotal moments, we’re reassured by the growth in the number of companies offering paid leaves as well as increases to the lengths of those leaves each year. By offering our benchmarking data, we hope to help companies set competitive, progressive, and equitable baselines for their leave policies. But even beyond that, we are here to raise the standard for how leaves are planned and managed so employers can best support a leave-taker to make the most of the time they need.