Sponsors (87)
Official title: To require employers to provide paid annual leave to employees, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 25, 2025 by Seth Magaziner · Last progress July 25, 2025
The bill guarantees daytime accrual and enforceable use of paid annual leave for millions of workers and strengthens enforcement and transparency, but it raises costs, administrative burdens, and litigation risk for employers (especially small businesses) and creates potential fiscal impacts for state and local governments and taxpayers.
Most private- and public-sector employees (hourly and salaried) earn paid annual leave from day one at a predictable accrual rate (1 hour per 25 worked), giving widespread, guaranteed paid time off.
Workers may use leave as it accrues for any reason, without having to disclose the reason, and employers must maintain employment benefits during leave, protecting privacy, continuity of health coverage, and caregiving flexibility.
Employees gain enforceable remedies: the ability to sue for unpaid leave, liquidated damages and interest, attorney’s fees and costs, and an extended statute of limitations for willful violations, improving access to relief.
Employers—especially small businesses—will face higher labor costs from mandatory accruals, carryover, separation pay, and treating salaried exempt employees for accrual purposes, which could translate into higher prices, fewer hires, reduced hours, or slower wage growth.
Tracking accruals, producing notices and paystub disclosures, complying with loaned-leave and notice rules, and responding to investigations will impose ongoing administrative and HR burdens, hitting small employers hardest.
Expanded enforcement remedies, liquidated damages, fee-shifting, and a longer statute of limitations increase litigation risk and financial exposure for employers (and remove some state sovereign immunity for recipients of federal funds), raising potential fiscal liability.
Based on analysis of 9 sections of legislative text.
Establishes a federal paid annual leave floor: at least 1 hour earned per 25 hours worked, up to 80 hours provided per year, with notice, recordkeeping, anti‑retaliation, and enforcement rules.
Creates a federal paid annual leave requirement that generally requires covered employers to provide paid annual leave at a rate of at least 1 hour for every 25 hours worked, with a maximum employer obligation of 80 hours per 12‑month period. The bill defines covered employees and employers, sets rules for accrual, use, carryover, payout at separation, notice and recordkeeping, anti‑retaliation protections, enforcement by the Secretary of Labor and private suits, and a public education campaign funded as needed. The law preserves more protective state, local, contractual, or plan-based leave rights and phases application for employees under existing collective bargaining agreements. Most provisions take effect 180 days after enactment with specified exceptions for active collective bargaining agreements.