Sick Leave and Medical Leave in the United States: A Categorization and Recent Trends

This chapter reviews and discusses recent trends of access to paid leave in the United States. Although we also categorize and discuss other programs for health-related work absences (such as medical leave or disability insurance), we deliberately focus on recent policy changes and discussions of short-term sick leave in the spirit of the Healthy Families Act. Specifically, we use representative data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) by the US Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) to sketch the most important trends in sick leave access for American employees over the past decade. We also discuss changes by type of job and provide evidence on how the recently passed mandates and the intensified policy discussion may have contributed to the observed increase in employee access to short-term sick leave.

Pichler, S. and Nicolas R. Ziebarth (2020), Sick Leave and Medical Leave in the United States: A Categorization and Recent Trends, in: A. Mathur, C. Ruhm (Eds.), 1, Vol. AEI-Brookings Paid Leave Project Washington DC, 31-59