Colorado Sick Leave Law: Accrual, Covered Uses, and HFWA Rules

Colorado’s sick leave law, formally the Healthy Families and Workplaces Act (HFWA), requires every employer in the state to provide paid sick leave. You earn at least one hour of leave for every 30 hours you work, up to 48 hours per year, and you can use it for your own illness, a family member’s care, bereavement, or safety needs tied to domestic abuse or sexual assault.¹

Which Employers and Workers Are Covered

HFWA applies to every employer operating in Colorado, from a one-person shop to a major corporation. Before 2022, businesses with 15 or fewer employees were exempt from the accrual requirements. That exemption is gone.²

The law now covers all employees working in Colorado, including part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers. The only exceptions are federal government employees and certain railroad workers covered by separate federal regulations.

How You Earn Hours and What Carries Over

You start earning paid sick leave on your first day of work, and you can use it as soon as you earn it.¹ The rate is one hour of leave for every 30 hours worked. Your employer can cap annual accrual at 48 hours, though some choose to offer more.

Instead of tracking accrual hour-by-hour, your employer can frontload the full 48 hours at the beginning of the benefit year. If they do, you have immediate access to the entire bank without waiting to accumulate.²

Any unused hours carry forward into the next year, up to 48 hours. Your employer is not required to let you use more than 48 hours in a single year, even if your balance is higher because of the carryover.¹ The carryover still matters. It gives you a cushion at the start of a new year before you’ve had time to accrue fresh hours.

What You Can Use the Hours For

HFWA covers a broader set of reasons than most people expect. The qualifying reasons fall into four main categories.

Your Own Health

You can use leave when you’re sick or injured, when you need a medical appointment, or for preventive care like a flu shot or a routine screening.³ Mental health conditions qualify equally with physical ones.

Caring for a Family Member

You can take leave to care for a family member who is sick, injured, or needs medical treatment or preventive care.³ The definition of “family member” under HFWA is wider than many people expect. It includes your immediate family, anyone who stood in a parental role for you (or you for them), and any person whose health or safety care you’re responsible for arranging.⁴ That last category is intentionally broad and can cover people like elderly neighbors or close friends you actively care for.

Bereavement

When a family member dies, you can use accrued leave to grieve, attend funeral services, or handle the financial and legal matters that follow a death.³ Many workers don’t realize their sick leave covers bereavement at all.

Domestic Abuse, Sexual Assault, or Harassment

If you or a family member has experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault, or harassment, you can use leave to get medical attention, seek counseling, work with a victim services organization, consult an attorney, or relocate to a safer situation.³

School and Care Closures

Even outside a declared emergency, you can use your regular accrued leave when a public official closes your child’s school or place of care and you need to stay home.³

How to Request Leave

When you know you’ll need leave in advance, give your employer as much notice as you can so they can plan around your absence. If the need is unexpected, notify them as soon as reasonably possible. Your employer can set a written policy for how you communicate leave requests, but the process can’t be so complicated that it discourages you from using your hours.

Employers can require you to take leave in increments of one hour. If your employer hasn’t specified a minimum increment in writing, you can use leave in blocks as small as six minutes.² That flexibility is useful for something like a mid-day therapy appointment where you only miss part of a shift.

Your employer can ask for documentation, such as a doctor’s note, only if you’re out for four or more consecutive workdays. For shorter absences, your word is enough.⁵ Even when documentation is required, your employer cannot demand that it explain the nature of your illness or the details of any domestic violence situation.

Extra Leave During a Public Health Emergency

HFWA includes a separate, more generous leave provision that kicks in whenever a public health emergency is declared. On the date of the declaration, your employer must supplement your existing sick leave balance so you have access to at least 80 hours total if you normally work 40 or more hours per week.⁶ If you work fewer than 40 hours, you’re entitled to the greater of your scheduled hours or your average actual hours over the 14-day period before the emergency was declared.

Your employer can count your unused accrued sick leave toward that 80-hour total, so this isn’t necessarily 80 hours on top of what you already have. The supplemental leave remains available until four weeks after the emergency officially ends.⁶ You can use it to self-isolate, seek treatment for the communicable illness behind the emergency, care for an affected family member, or comply with a public official’s order to stay home.

What Happens to Unused Hours When You Leave a Job

Unlike vacation time, unused HFWA sick leave does not get paid out when you quit, get fired, retire, or otherwise leave the job.¹ The one exception is if your employer took retaliatory action that prevented you from using leave you’d earned. In that case, the unused leave can become part of the damages in a retaliation claim.

This distinction trips people up because Colorado law generally does require payout of accrued vacation at separation. Sick leave doesn’t work the same way.

Retaliation Protections

Colorado prohibits employers from retaliating against you for requesting or using paid sick leave, filing a complaint about a violation, or cooperating with an investigation.⁷ Retaliation includes obvious actions like firing or demotion, and also subtler moves: cutting your hours, threatening to report your immigration status, or disciplining you in ways that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t taken leave.⁸

Your employer must keep any health-related information you provide confidential, along with any details related to domestic violence or sexual assault. When you return from leave, you’re entitled to your same position (or an equivalent one) with the same pay and benefits you had before you left.⁵

Filing a Complaint

If your employer denies you sick leave or retaliates against you, you have two paths. You can file a complaint with the Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics, or you can send a written demand directly to your employer. Either way, the employer gets 14 days to respond.⁸ You must take one of these steps before you can file a civil lawsuit.

If the matter isn’t resolved, you can bring a civil action in district court within two years of the violation. Each time your employer fails to provide leave or retaliates counts as a separate violation, so the clock runs from the most recent incident, not just the first one. If you win, remedies can include back pay, reinstatement to your job, and additional damages.⁸

How HFWA Interacts With FAMLI

Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI) program is a separate, state-run insurance system that provides partial wage replacement for longer leaves. HFWA and FAMLI are independent, but they can overlap when you’re dealing with a qualifying medical situation.⁹

The key rule: your employer cannot require you to use your HFWA sick leave before or during FAMLI leave. You may choose to, though, to “top off” your FAMLI benefit so your total pay gets closer to your full wages. Topping off requires a written agreement between you and your employer, and the combined amount from FAMLI benefits and sick leave cannot exceed your average weekly wage.⁹

1
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-403 – Paid Sick Leave – Accrual – Carry Forward to Subsequent Year – Comparable Leave Provided by Employer – No Payment for Unused Leave – Rules
2
Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Interpretive Notice and Formal Opinion 6B – Paid Sick Leave Under the Healthy Families and Workplaces Act
3
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-404 – Use of Paid Sick Leave – Purposes – Time Increments
4
Justia. Colorado Code 8-13.3-402 – Definitions
5
Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Interpretive Notice and Formal Opinion 6B – Paid Sick Leave Under the Healthy Families and Workplaces Act
6
FindLaw. Colorado Code 8-13.3-405 – Supplemental Paid Sick Leave During a Public Health Emergency
7
Colorado Division of Labor Standards and Statistics. Interpretive Notice and Formal Opinion 5A – Retaliation Protections
8
Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act
9
Family and Medical Leave Insurance (FAMLI). FAMLI and Other Types of Leave