California AB 1033: CFRA Eligibility, Job Reinstatement, and Mediation

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 family member with a serious health condition, address their own serious health condition, or handle a qualifying military exigency. Since January 1, 2021, the law applies to every private employer in California with five or more employees, along with all state and local government employers. If you work for a small business that used to be too small to worry about family leave, that has changed.

Which Employers Are Covered

Before 2021, CFRA tracked the federal Family and Medical Leave Act: it reached only employers with 50 or more employees within 75 miles of the worker’s jobsite. Both of those thresholds are gone.

Any private business in California with at least five workers on its payroll must comply, no matter how small the operation feels. Public employers are covered regardless of size.¹ The 75-mile radius rule was eliminated entirely, so a remote employee in Eureka whose employer is headquartered in San Diego with six total employees still qualifies, even with no coworkers nearby.²

Which Family Members You Can Take Leave to Care For

The list of qualifying family members is broader than it used to be, and much broader than federal FMLA. Under current CFRA, you can take leave to care for: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 was added in 2023. You can name anyone related by blood, such as an aunt, uncle, or cousin, or anyone whose relationship is the equivalent of family, such as an unmarried partner or close friend. You identify your designated person when you request leave. Employers can limit each employee to one designated person per 12-month period.¹

Who Is Eligible and For What Reasons

To qualify for CFRA leave, you must meet two conditions. You need at least 12 months of service with the employer (the months don’t have to be consecutive, and time on leave counts), and you need at least 1,250 hours of actual work in the 12 months before the leave starts. Time already on leave does not count toward the 1,250-hour figure.³

If you’re eligible, you get up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period for any of these reasons:

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 covered family member with a serious health condition
Your own serious health condition that prevents you from doing your job
A qualifying exigency arising from a spouse, domestic partner, child, or parent’s active military duty or call to active duty

You don’t have to take the 12 weeks in a single block. CFRA leave can be intermittent, such as a few hours for a medical appointment or a day at a time for recurring treatment, or it can take the form of a reduced schedule. An employer cannot force you to take more leave than is medically necessary. If you need two hours for a treatment appointment, the employer can’t require you to take the whole day.¹

How to Request Leave and What the Employer Can Ask

For foreseeable leave, such as a planned surgery or an expected due date, give at least 30 days’ advance notice. For unforeseeable events, notify the employer as soon as practical, even by phone. If you don’t give proper notice for foreseeable leave, the employer can delay the start of the leave until the notice requirement is met.⁴

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

No certification can be required for bonding leave with a healthy newborn or newly placed child. There’s no health condition to certify. The employer also cannot contact your healthcare provider for any reason other than verifying that the certification is authentic, and cannot demand a specific diagnosis or medical details beyond what the regulations allow. If the employer has a good-faith, objective reason to doubt a certification, it can require a second opinion from a different provider at its own expense.⁵

Before you return from your own medical leave, the employer can require a fitness-for-duty release, but only if it applies that requirement uniformly to everyone returning from illness or disability, not just to those who took CFRA leave.⁵

Pay During Leave

CFRA protects your job. It does not require your employer to keep paying you. Wage replacement comes from a separate program, California 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 earning above that threshold receive 70 percent of their wages, up to a maximum weekly benefit of $1,765.⁷ PFL is funded entirely through employee payroll contributions to the State Disability Insurance program, at a rate of 1.3 percent of all wages for 2026, with no taxable wage ceiling.⁸

PFL and CFRA have separate eligibility rules. You can qualify for PFL wage replacement even if you don’t meet CFRA’s requirements for job protection, and the reverse is also true. PFL covers bonding with a new child and caring for a seriously ill family member. It does not cover your own medical condition, which falls under SDI’s separate disability benefits.

Health Insurance and Job Reinstatement

During CFRA leave, the employer must continue your group health insurance on the same terms as if you were still working. That includes medical, dental, vision, mental health, and dependent coverage if those are part of the plan, with the employer’s share of the premium unchanged. If you normally contribute toward the premium, you keep doing so during leave. The employer must give advance written notice of how and when payments are due. If your payment is more than 30 days late, the employer can terminate coverage, but must give at least 15 days’ written notice first.⁹

When your 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. The commute cannot meaningfully increase, the duties must be substantially similar, and the authority level must be equivalent.¹⁰

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.¹¹ CFRA has no equivalent exception. The reinstatement right applies to every eligible employee regardless of compensation level.

How CFRA Stacks With FMLA and Pregnancy Disability Leave

If your employer has 50 or more employees, both CFRA and federal FMLA apply. When leave is taken for a reason covered by both laws, the two clocks tick together. You get 12 weeks total, not 24.¹²

The clocks run separately when a reason qualifies under only one law. CFRA covers grandparents, grandchildren, siblings, domestic partners, and designated persons, none of whom FMLA covers. Leave to care for those relatives uses your CFRA bank without touching FMLA. Going the other way, FMLA provides up to 26 weeks of military caregiver leave to care for a seriously injured service member, which CFRA does not match.¹²

Pregnancy is where the layering matters most. In California, pregnancy-related disability is covered by the separate Pregnancy Disability Leave (PDL) law, which provides up to four months of leave. PDL and FMLA run at the same time during pregnancy disability. CFRA bonding leave runs afterward. A California employee who uses four months of PDL and then 12 weeks of CFRA bonding leave can be out for roughly seven months in total. By the time PDL ends, FMLA is typically exhausted, so the entire CFRA bonding period sits on its own with no federal overlap.¹³ The employer’s obligation to maintain health insurance also stacks: it runs for the full duration of PDL and separately for up to 12 weeks of CFRA leave.⁹

Filing a Complaint

The California Civil Rights Department (CRD) enforces CFRA. An employee who believes their CFRA rights were violated has three years from the date of the last harmful act to file an administrative complaint with CRD.¹⁴ You can also request an immediate right-to-sue notice and take the claim to court directly. If CRD investigates and later issues a right-to-sue letter, you generally have one year from that notice to file a lawsuit.

Available remedies in a successful CFRA case include back pay and front pay, compensatory damages for emotional distress, punitive damages for particularly egregious conduct, attorney’s fees and litigation costs, and injunctive relief such as a reinstatement order or required policy changes and training. The most common violations CRD sees are retaliation against employees who request leave and failure to reinstate employees to equivalent positions when they return.

Small Employer Mediation

If you work for an employer with 5 to 19 employees, an extra step comes before court. After you obtain a right-to-sue notice alleging a CFRA violation, you cannot immediately file suit. You must notify CRD, and either side has 30 days to request mediation. If mediation is requested, both sides must participate. If neither side requests mediation within 30 days, or both agree to skip it, the employee can proceed to court. An employee who files suit without completing mediation gives the employer grounds to ask the court to pause the case until mediation wraps up.¹⁵

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
California Employment Development Department. Contribution Rates and Benefit Amounts
9
Legal Information Institute. Cal Code Regs Tit 2, 11092 – Terms of CFRA Leave
10
Legal Information Institute. Cal Code Regs Tit 2, 11089 – Right to Reinstatement
11
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.219 – Rights of a Key Employee
12
University of California San Francisco. FMLA and CFRA Fact Sheet
13
California Civil Rights Department. Leave for Pregnancy Disability and Child Bonding Quick Reference Guide
14
California Civil Rights Department. Complaint Process
15
Civil Rights Department. Small Employer Family Leave Mediation Program