California has two paid leave programs in effect: Paid Sick Leave, and Paid Family Leave.
Paid Sick Leave
Employers must provide and allow employees to use at least 40 hours or five days of paid sick leave per year. This leave may be used for recovering from a personal illness, going to a doctor's appointment, getting preventative care, or caring for a sick family member. It also applies to victims of domestic violence or sexual assault.
For more information, visit the California DIR website.
Paid Family Leave
Paid Family Leave (PFL) provides benefit payments when your employee needs time off from work to:
- Care for a seriously ill family member.
- Bond with a new child entering the family through birth, adoption, or foster care placement.
- Support a family member in the US armed forces who is deploying to a foreign country.
For more information, visit the California EDD website.
How to set up time off accruals in OnPay
Go to Payroll, then Set up, and click Accrual Policies.
Click Add in the upper right to open the Policy Setup template.
The Policy Setup template is divided into two parts:
- Policy name and type
- Policy setup
Policy name and type
Give this policy a unique name that sets it apart from other accruals. The name should make it very clear how and when this policy will apply. For this example, we'll make a sick time policy that accrues annually, but we'll explore many more examples later in this article.
Determine the timeframe by which accrued time is earned. Your choices are “Per hour worked,” “Per pay period,” or “Annual on anniversary date” (hire date).
Choose when these hours will expire, if ever. Your choices are “Hours do not expire”, “Hours expire on anniversary”, or “Hours expire on Jan 1st”.
Select the accrual type.
Policy Setup
The Policy Setup is in three periods. This means hours accrued by workers can increase with their tenure in up to three stages. To create a probationary period, where no time is accrued until this introductory period is over, enter "0" per hour, then the number of months in the probationary period. If you don't want accruals to increase, enter the same information in each period. Unused hours will rollover to the next period. We'll explore more examples later.
Note: Setting the "Cap" is not the same as setting a "rollover limit".
- Some businesses limit the amount of unused time off that an employee can continue to hold going into a new year. This is to ensure that employees are taking the time they need to live a balanced and full life, as well as to protect the business from employees taking or cashing out large sums of paid time off all at once. We'll show you how to limit rollover in How to assign time off accrual policies to employees→
First two periods
For the first two periods, enter:
- How many hours can be accrued each year
- For how many months time is accrued at this rate
- The limit, or cap for these hours.
Third period
You don’t need to indicate the number of months in the third period. This period lasts for the remainder of the worker's employment.
Click Create when you're ready to finalize this accrual. Clicking Not Now will close this window, but will not save your progress.