Nancy Gunzenhauser Popper, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s New York office, was quoted in HR Dive, in “State Paid Family Leave Benefit Changes in 2026,” by Ginger Christ.
Following is an excerpt:
A handful of new state paid family and medical leave laws come into effect in 2026, bringing with them new compliance checklists for employers.
“First and foremost, employers need to be aware of where they have employees,” Nancy Gunzenhauser Popper, member of the firm at Epstein Becker & Green, told HR Dive. “It’s really important with a distributed workforce to have accurate records of where they have employees working. Most of these paid family medical leave laws will apply even if you have one employee working in that state.”
She recommends employers establish a policy for remote workers including that an employee has an affirmative obligation to tell their employer when they move to a new state, so that the employer can stay on top of any legal requirement.
Generally, most paid family medical leave laws require some sort of premium to be paid into the state fund — either through required deductions on employee wages or via an employer paying a certain amount on the employee’s behalf, she said.
The logistics, she said, can be tricky.
“Each state is a little bit different,” Gunzenhauser Popper said. “There are different eligibility periods. There are different reasons for use. There are different periods of time that employees can be out and the amount of pay that employees are receiving.”
Some states, for example, have voluntary programs, like Vermont, she said.
“I think more and more states are considering these,” Gunzenhauser Popper said, adding that other states will likely watch how other efforts play out, learn from those programs and propose their own legislation.
