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employers allow employees PTO for other purposes, such as vacation or personal leave. The
employer is not required to provide additional time designated for earned sick leave if the
vacation or personal leave days may be used for earned sick leave and the employer’s policy
meets all requirements of the law.
2. Is an employer with a compliant PTO policy required to retain records documenting
hours worked, earned sick leave accrued, used, paid, paid out and carried over?
The employer with a compliant PTO policy need not retain separate records documenting the
accrual, use, payment, payout and carry over of leave taken for purposes covered under the
Earned Sick Leave Law. That is, the employer is not required to keep such records separate from
records documenting leave taken for other purposes under the PTO policy. However, an
employer with a compliant PTO policy must for the five-year period specified in the law retain
records of the accrual, use, payment, payout and carry over of their employees’ PTO so as to
allow the Department during a possible inspection to confirm that the employer is continuing to
comply with the requirements of the Earned Sick Leave Law relative to the PTO policy.
3. The Earned Sick Leave Law states that an employer who offers a PTO policy, which is
fully paid (including but not limited to personal days, vacation days and sick days), where
the PTO may be used for the purposes listed in the law and in the manner provided in the
law and is accrued at a rate equal to or greater than the rate described in the law, that PTO
policy is compliant with the law. If an employer has such a PTO policy, is the employer
required to record hours of leave used for the purposes listed in the Earned Sick Leave
Law separately from hours of leave used for other purposes under the PTO policy? For
example, would the employer be required to record leave used by an employee for a typical
vacation separate from leave used to care for an ill family member?
No. The employer who has a compliant PTO policy is not required to record leave used for
purposes covered under the Earned Sick Leave Law separate from leave used for other purposes.
Thus, in the example cited above, both the vacation leave and the leave to care for an ill family
member would simply be recorded as PTO.
4. If an employer has an existing PTO policy that provides more than the 40 hours required
under the Earned Sick Leave Law—for example, if the PTO program provides for 80
hours of PTO —and where under the existing PTO policy an employee had never been
permitted to carry over PTO from one benefit year to the next; if after the Earned Sick
Leave Law goes into effect the employee uses 40 hours of PTO in a given benefit year, must
the employer permit the employee to carry over the remaining 40 hours of PTO to the next
benefit year?
In a compliant PTO policy where the employer chooses to advance PTO, rather than have the
employee accrue PTO, in the final month of the employer’s benefit year, the employer must
either provide the employee a payout for the full amount of unused PTO (up to 40 hours) or
permit the employee to carry over any unused PTO, except that the employer is not required to
permit the employee to carry forward from one benefit year to the next more than 40 hours of
PTO. Thus, in the example cited above, the employer would be required to permit the employee
to carry over the remaining 40 hours of PTO; which is to say, the carry-over requirement would
not be extinguished by the employee’s use of 40 hours of PTO in a single benefit year. That
said, however, as mentioned elsewhere in these FAQs, the Earned Sick Leave Law also