New Jersey's Family Leave Act Now Covers 15-Employee Businesses

For most of its history, New Jersey's Family Leave Act was a law small businesses could safely set aside. It only applied once you had 30 employees, and a new hire had to work a full year and 1,000 hours before they qualified. If you ran a 20-person contracting company in Toms River or a busy dental practice in Freehold, it simply wasn't your law.

That changed on July 17, 2026. Amendments signed in January cut the coverage threshold in half, shortened the eligibility clock to a matter of months, and — the part catching the most owners off guard — made time out on state disability and family leave benefits job-protected at businesses of every size. If your leave policy hasn't been touched since spring, here's what changed and what to do about it.

What changed on July 17

• Coverage: The NJ Family Leave Act (NJFLA) now applies to employers with 15 or more employees, down from 30 — and employees are counted across every location, not just New Jersey.
• Eligibility: An employee qualifies after three months on the job and 250 hours worked in the past 12 months, down from 12 months and 1,000 hours.
• Job protection for TDI and FLI: Any employee who receives New Jersey Temporary Disability Insurance or Family Leave Insurance benefits now has the right to return to their job, no matter how small the employer.
• Order of leave: Employees eligible for both earned sick leave and TDI or FLI benefits can choose which to use first — though they can't collect more than one kind of paid leave at the same time.

You may have read that the threshold will keep falling — to 10 employees in 2027 and 5 in 2028. That schedule was in an earlier draft of the bill, but it was struck before the final vote. As enacted, the line is 15 employees.

The change that reaches even the smallest employers

Here's the part that matters even if you have five employees. Before July 17, New Jersey's Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) and Family Leave Insurance (FLI) programs replaced part of an employee's paycheck while they were out, but the benefits laws themselves didn't promise the job would be waiting when they came back. That promise came from the NJFLA or the federal FMLA — and most small employers weren't covered by either.

Now it's built in. An employee who collects TDI for their own illness, injury, surgery, or pregnancy — or FLI to bond with a new child or care for a family member — is entitled to return to the same job, or an equivalent one with the same pay, benefits, seniority, and other terms. The New Jersey Department of Labor's guidance is explicit: there's no minimum employer size and no minimum time on the job.

What didn't change

The core of the NJFLA is the same. An eligible employee can take up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave in a 24-month period to bond with a new child — by birth, adoption, or foster placement — to care for a family member with a serious health condition, or for certain public-health-emergency reasons. The leave itself is still unpaid; the paycheck replacement usually comes from FLI, which employees fund through their own payroll contributions.

The NJFLA also still doesn't cover an employee's own medical condition. That's what TDI is for — and why its new job protection matters so much.

Who's newly affected

• Employers with 15 to 29 employees, who are covered by the NJFLA for the first time.
• Every New Jersey employer, of any size, when an employee receives TDI or FLI benefits.
• Businesses with part-time staff. At 20 hours a week, an employee reaches 250 hours in about three months — right when the time-on-the-job requirement is met.
• Companies based outside New Jersey. Because headcount includes employees in every location, a 40-person Pennsylvania company with a few New Jersey employees owes those employees NJFLA leave.

What to do now

1. 1Confirm your headcount. Count everyone on payroll across all locations, and check whether you had 15 or more employees for each working day in 20 or more weeks of this year or last.
2. 2Update your handbook. A leave policy that still says employees qualify "after 12 months of service" is now wrong. Rewrite it for the new eligibility rules, the TDI/FLI reinstatement right, and employees' ability to choose the order of their leave.
3. 3Refresh your notices. Make sure the leave postings and employee notices you display and hand out are current, and that employees know how to apply for TDI and FLI.
4. 4Train anyone who approves time off. Most leave problems start with a manager — an offhand comment about whether the job will be held, or a permanent replacement hired before the employee is back. Route every leave request through one person who knows the rules.
5. 5Plan coverage for key roles. Decide now how you'd cover a critical position for 12 or even 26 weeks — cross-training, temporary help, or redistributing work — so a leave request is an inconvenience, not a crisis.
6. 6Document every leave. Record when it was requested and approved, which type it was, and the dates out and back. Clean records are your best defense if a reinstatement decision is ever questioned.

Getting your policies current

If you've just crossed 15 employees — or you run a smaller business that assumed leave laws were a big-company problem — start with your handbook, because a policy written for the old rules is now a liability. Our guide to building a compliant handbook for a small company covers the basics, and we write custom employee handbooks that reflect the law as it stands today, then keep them current as part of ongoing HR compliance support.

For Ocean County and Monmouth County businesses without a dedicated HR person, our fractional HR consulting puts that expertise on call — so the next leave request is handled right the first time, without adding a full-time hire.