HARRISBURG — There’s a real chance Pennsylvania lawmakers could begin requiring employers to provide paid parental and medical leave, supporters say, though there are still critical disagreements on who should carry the cost.
The Democratic-controlled state House passed a paid leave bill in late March, the first time such a policy has cleared a chamber after at least seven years of debate on the issue.
There’s bipartisan support for the idea in the GOP-led state Senate, too. A key Republican committee chair sponsored a leave bill in 2024 and shepherded it through his own committee, though it never received a floor vote.
That lawmaker, Devlin Robinson (R., Allegheny), told Spotlight PA that he remains “committed” to passing paid family and medical leave and has introduced his bill again this session.
“The last thing anyone should have to do is worry about how to put food on the table during a life-altering health emergency, following the birth of a child, or while caring for a sick loved one,” Robinson said. “I look forward to working with my colleagues on the committee to find a workable solution on paid family leave that meets the needs of families and employers alike.”
State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) — whose support is necessary to advance legislation in that chamber — did not respond to a request for comment on the House’s bill.
One of the key issues dividing lawmakers, largely along party lines, is whether they need to protect businesses from costs associated with leave.
The bill the state House passed, which is sponsored by Rep. Jennifer O’Mara (D., Delaware), would require employers to provide 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents, victims of violent acts, and individuals facing or recovering from a serious health condition, including illness, injury, and pregnancy. That offer includes employees caring for a family member with a serious health condition.
To qualify, employees would need to have worked at least 18 weeks at their employer or earned the same amount of income that would qualify them for unemployment benefits. Compensation would be based on the statewide average weekly wage, with lower-income employees being eligible for larger proportions of their pay.
Employers would foot the full cost of providing such leave, though O’Mara’s bill would create a grant program within the Department of Community & Economic Development for businesses with fewer than 50 employees. The bill itself doesn’t include a funding proposal, meaning the legislature would later need to find a source of money for the grants and approve it.
A previous version of the bill, which O’Mara inherited from former state Rep. Dan Miller (D., Allegheny), would have relied on a combination of employee and employer contributions to pay for the program. It would also have granted up to 20 weeks of paid leave.
Those aspects of the proposal were removed in a sweeping amendment last Tuesday, the day before the legislation was brought to a vote.
When asked why she introduced a major amendment to her legislation, O’Mara said in a statement, “Working with dozens of key stakeholders, the language evolved into a strong bill that will support workers while giving businesses the ability to craft a leave program that best fit their business and employee needs."
During debate on the state House floor, O’Mara cited her experience at 18 caring for her newborn brother while her mom returned to work as a school bus driver just three weeks postpartum. She also said her own husband, a disabled combat veteran, had to quit his job last year to seek emergency care because he hadn’t worked for his employer long enough to qualify for leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.
“These are things that we will later pay for here in Pennsylvania, when we have workers unable to contribute to the workforce because they're choosing between their paycheck and caring for themselves,” O’Mara said.
The amendment to O’Mara’s bill angered at least one co-sponsor, state Rep. Kathleen Tomlinson (R., Bucks).
“The bill we are voting on will go nowhere after today,” Tomlinson told her colleagues on the floor. “This bill has been reconstructed and thrown together very quickly for the sake of saying we did something, and that's unacceptable to me.”
Tomlinson was among the 107 lawmakers to vote in favor of the bill (she said she did so to support addressing the issue, not the legislation itself). Ninety-one Republican lawmakers and one Democrat, Frank Burns of Cambria County, opposed the bill.
Some Republicans who opposed the legislation said it would raise costs for small businesses, as a New Jersey Business and Industry Association report from 2012 found after the state adopted its paid leave law in 2008. That same survey also found many businesses hadn’t experienced an impact on their profits or the productivity of employees, and had little to no trouble adjusting to the law.
Several more recent studies have found that paid leave policies can improve employee retention, morale, and productivity.
The paid leave proposal introduced by Robinson in the state Senate has more in common with the first version of O’Mara’s bill.
It would rely solely on employee payroll deductions, capped at 1% of someone's income, and give 20 weeks of paid leave to new parents or someone recovering from illness, surgery, or injury; and 12 weeks to individuals caring for a family member with a serious health condition.
Robinson said in a statement that he still needed to review the impacts of the amendments to the state House’s bill.
There are reasons to be optimistic that this will be the year Pennsylvania lawmakers pass paid leave, said Dan O'Brien, a policy director at Philadelphia-based advocacy group Children First PA and former state Senate aide.
It’s a popular idea that comes with no cost, beyond the grant program, and offers an easy political win, he said. And it’s something the top Republicans in the state Senate — Pittman and President Pro Tempore Kim Ward — are open to, O’Brien said, based on conversations with their offices.
A spokesperson for Ward said only that she “is reviewing the bill” from the state House. Ward was one of two Republicans who voted against Robinson’s paid leave proposal when it passed his committee in 2024.
On the funding disagreements between the chambers, O’Brien said it makes sense for party leaders to compromise on a program where “workers and their employers split the cost.”
While Allegheny County and Philadelphia require businesses with at least 26 and 10 employees, respectively, to provide paid leave, eligibility for other workers in the state depends on their employer. An analysis of federal data cited by O’Mara’s office estimates that about 4.3 million workers, or two-thirds of the workforce, in Pennsylvania do not have paid family leave.
Nationwide, nearly three-quarters of working adults in the public and private sectors similarly do not have access to paid family leave, according to 2023 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (That data, though the most recent available, doesn't include beneficiaries of newer paid leave laws enacted in other states.)
Only 13 states and Washington, D.C., have adopted legislation to require paid family and medical leave, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That includes Pennsylvania’s neighbors, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York. (Virginia lawmakers approved a program in March, and the governor is expected to sign it into law.)
Proponents of adopting such a program in Pennsylvania point to the popularity of existing ones among workers and some small businesses, and to studies that have shown paid leave programs especially support lower- and middle-wage workers.
“Being able to take time off work is fundamentally an access to care issue, and our current patchwork system of paid and unpaid leave forces some patients and caregivers to choose between treating their illness and keeping their job or having enough income to survive,” a coalition of Pennsylvania health care organizations wrote in a letter supporting O’Mara’s bill. “This only serves to place stress on Pennsylvania patients and families and exacerbate health inequities.”
A study from the Center for Law and Social Policy, cited by the state House Appropriations Committee in determining the cost of O’Mara’s legislation, estimated employees in Pennsylvania lost more than $2 billion of wages from unpaid or partially paid family and medical leave in 2023.
The researchers also found that Black and Hispanic employees are disproportionately more likely not to take leave when needed, compared to white employees.
O’Brien of Children First PA pointed to a 2025 study conducted by Osage Research for his organization that found 81% of Pennsylvanians support the creation of a fund to provide workers with paid parental or medical leave.
“Passing a statewide paid family medical aid program would be the biggest thing that Harrisburg could do to impact the most people in Pennsylvania,” he said.
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