This article reviews the current debate about sick pay mandates and medical leave in the United States. The United States is one of three industrialized countries that do not guarantee access to paid sick leave for all employees. We first provide a categorization of the different paid leave concepts such as sick leave, medical leave, or temporary disability insurance, both in a domestic and an international context.
Then we use data from the National Compensation Survey to sketch employee coverage rates by type of job. We also document changes since 2010, focusing on paid sick leave. Although gaps in access have decreased over the past decade, we still find large inequalities in access to paid sick leave: While overall coverage increased to 78% in 2023 from 64% in 2015, about half of all part-time employees, employees in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution, and employees in the accommodation and food industry still have no access to paid sick leave benefits. In the last part, we discuss implications of the lack of access to paid sick and medical leave benefits. Moreover, building on international research findings and experiences, we discuss what a possible integration, coordination, and expansion of the co-existing programs could look like.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.