Giving Compass' Take:

• Isabel V. Sawhill, Sarah Nzau, and Katherine Guyot use three surveys to describe the state of paid family leave in America.

• How can funders work to expand access to paid leave? What cultural shifts are needed to increase the use of available paid family leave? 

• Read about paid leave and economic growth. 

The United States is still the only advanced country in the world without a federal paid leave policy. In the absence of such a policy, some workers currently access paid leave through benefit plans provided by employers or through social insurance programs offered by a handful of states. A key question for future policy discussions is the extent to which American workers are already accessing paid leave through employer-provided plans, and what additional needs might be met by state or federal policies.

Administrative data on access to and use of paid leave offered by states is difficult to access and not nationally representative, so we cannot derive estimates on all workers’ access to paid family and medical leave from this data (although researchers have found administrative data from California and New Jersey useful for studying the long-term effects of program participation).

One of the most cited estimates on workers’ access to paid leave is that only 19% of U.S. employees have access to paid family leave through an employer. This comes from the benefits portion of the National Compensation Survey produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Some critics argue that this number is too low, since surveys of employees suggest around half can take paid time off for family reasons, even in the absence of a formal benefit plan.

Below, we look at key differences between three surveys that provided new data on access to and use of paid leave in 2019.

Workers may have access to leave for various purposes, such as vacation, personal days, or general paid time off. We focus on paid family and medical leave, which refer specifically to paid time away from work to address personal illness, to care for a new child, or to care for an ill family member.

Two of the most common sources of data on access to paid leave are the benefits portion of the National Compensation Survey and the Access to and Use of Leave Module of the American Time Use Survey (both produced by BLS), which released new data on leave benefits in 2019. In the next section, we discuss key differences in how these surveys measure leave access.

In addition to looking at access, the American Time Use Survey also measures take-up of leave benefits and provides insight into the reasons workers do not always use leave benefits that are available to them. We compare this to data from the American Family Survey, a fairly new household survey that released data on the use of leave benefits in 2019.

The three surveys we focus on are summarized below.

  • The National Compensation Survey is an establishment survey that collects data on employer-sponsored benefits, including paid leave. Since NCS data is collected directly from employers, it provides more detailed and accurate information on official employer leave policies. NCS data is updated annually.
  • The Access to and Use of Leave module of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) is a survey of wage and salary workers about access to and use of paid and unpaid leave at their main job. The leave module was first introduced in 2011, and questions about leave were not asked again until 2017-2018.
  • Since 2015, the American Family Survey (AFS) has been measuring attitudes and practices surrounding marriage and families. In 2019, the survey collected data about respondents’ experiences with using family leave.

Read the full article about paid family leave in America by Isabel V. Sawhill, Sarah Nzau, and Katherine Guyot at Brookings.