Categories: Employee Benefits, Employment Law, Legislative (Federal and State) Developments
Maryland has amended its parental leave law to clarify that, effective October 1, 2025, employers covered by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”) are exempt from the Maryland Parental Leave Act (“MPLA”).
The MPLA, codified as Section 3-12 of Maryland’s Labor and Employment Code, requires covered employers to provide eligible employees with up to six weeks of unpaid parental leave for the birth, adoption, or foster placement of a child. The statute applies to Maryland employers with at least 15 but fewer than 50 employees for each “working day during each of 20 or more calendar workweeks in the current or preceding calendar year.” The FMLA, conversely, applies to employers with 50 or more employees and allows qualified employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for qualifying events, which also include birth, adoption or foster placement of a child, among others. Similar to the MPLA, the FMLA measures how many employees a company employs by looking at how many were employed in 20 or more workweeks in the preceding or current year.
The MLPA was intended to apply to smaller employers not covered by the FMLA in order to provide parental leave to employees of such smaller companies. However, there have been occasions of overlap, where both laws apply to companies that change in size. For example, currently, if a Maryland employer has 47 employees for part of the year (or the...
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told ABC News that Russian forces were attacking Ukraine even before the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) launched the Spiderweb operation. He stated that ...