The Employment Security Department (ESD) has undertaken rulemaking to implement HB 1213, the Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) job protections bill passed in the 2025 legislative session. The changes will be effective January 1, 2026, and have significant impact on employers including employers with fewer than 50 employees.

ESD has posted proposed changes to PFML rules for review and comment and has scheduled a hearing on the proposed changes from November 25 starting at 9 am. You can find more information about the meeting and register to provide comments here.

AWC is particularly focused on the proposed changes to implement the job protection stacking and notices. We recently provided the following feedback to ESD expressing concerns with the proposed language:

In draft WAC 192-700-025(4)(b), an employer is required to notify an employee of “the start and end dates of the employer’s designated 12-month leave year under the FMLA.” The problem is that most employers use a rolling lookback method for FMLA, so it is impossible to specify the end date of the employer’s designated 12-month leave period. With the rolling method, the leave year technically never ends, as an employee can continue taking FMLA so long as, when you look back 12 months, they haven’t used more than 12 weeks of FMLA. So it’s a technical impossibility to provide the notice specified in the WAC. The rule needs to include options so that it’s possible to achieve compliance.

In draft WAC 192-700-030, please clarify that it only applies IF an employer is trying to take advantage of the stacking limitation. This WAC requires employer to provide a notice to employees regarding their employment restoration rights under PFML. Under current law it is extraordinarily difficult for employers to know when ESD deems an employee to have exhausted PFML because it depends on how ESD calculates PFML usages; however ESD doesn’t share with employers. Under this new legislation an employer can count some FMLA use against the PFML entitlement, so an employer would actually have information that ESD would not have (about an employee’s FMLA use). So it makes sense in that situation for an employer to notify an employee when they are about to exhaust protected leave. But it does not make sense in ALL cases for an employer to have that notification requirement. In situations where an employer is not counting FMLA against PFML entitlements, the employer is not in a good position to know exactly when ESD will conclude that an employee has exhausted PFML leave. It would thus be very unfair to require an employer to notify an employee of their restoration rights five days before PFML leave is exhausted.

We encourage cities to review these changes and provide feedback to ESD via rules@esd.wa.gov and at the upcoming hearing.

As a quick refresher, HB 1213 made major changes to the state’s Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) program by expanding the PFML law’s job protection provisions to more employees (including employees of many smaller employers) and allowing those protections to start at 180 days of employment. The bill changes the small employer threshold and phases it in over a three-year period as follows:

• 25 or more employees from January 1, 2026, to December 31, 2026;
• 15 or more employees from January 1, 2027, to December 31, 2027; and
• 8 or more employees on or after January 1, 2028.

  The bill intended to make it easier for employers to require state PFML and federal FMLA leaves to run concurrently – reducing the likelihood of “stacking” leave to extend absences. However, as noted in the comments AWC referenced above, the proposed rules call into question whether or not this aspect of the bill will be implemented in a manner that makes it possible for employers to comply.