Paid Sick Leave Accrual by State (2026)

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Disclaimer: Informational only, not legal, HR, tax, or financial advice. Sick leave laws change often and several states are mid phase-in. Confirm current rules with your state labor department or an employment attorney before relying on them.

How Sick Leave Accrual Actually Works

Almost every state sick leave law is written as a ratio: one hour of paid sick leave earned for every so many hours you work. That means your timesheet is the input. The balance on your pay stub is something you can predict and then check for yourself.

There are two ways an employer can satisfy these laws. Accrual, where the balance builds hour by hour as you work. Or front-loading, where the employer drops the full annual amount into your account on day one and skips the tracking. Front-loading is simple and usually more generous early in the year. Accrual is what most hourly workers get.

If you are on the accrual method, convert the ratio into a decimal and the math gets easy.

The ratio-to-decimal conversion

Accrual ratio	Sick hours per hour worked	Full-time year (2,080 hrs)	Part-time (20 hrs/week)
1 per 30	0.0333	69.3 hrs	34.7 hrs
1 per 35	0.0286	59.4 hrs	29.7 hrs
1 per 37	0.0270	56.2 hrs	28.1 hrs
1 per 40	0.0250	52.0 hrs	26.0 hrs
1 per 43	0.0233	48.4 hrs	24.2 hrs
1 per 52	0.0192	40.0 hrs	20.0 hrs
1 per 87	0.0115	23.9 hrs	12.0 hrs

Work an 80-hour biweekly period in a 1-per-30 state and you earned 80 × 0.0333 = 2.67 hours of sick time. Work 62 hours because two shifts got cut, and you earned 2.07 hours. The number moves with your actual hours, not your schedule on paper.

Now look at the full-time column. At 1 per 30, a year of full-time work would generate 69.3 hours of sick leave. No state lets you use that much. Every mandate state sets an annual cap well below it, which is why the cap matters more than the rate for most full-timers. Vermont’s 1-per-52 rate is the exception: it is calibrated to land almost exactly on its own 40-hour cap after a full-time year.

Part-timers are the group where the rate actually governs. At 20 hours a week in a 1-per-30 state, you finish the year around 34.7 hours, comfortably under a 40-hour cap, so the ratio is the only thing determining your balance.

Paid Sick Leave Accrual Rates by State (2026 Table)

Twenty states and the District of Columbia have a statewide mandate in force in 2026. Other roundups put the count at 20, 21, 22, or 23, and the spread comes down to a counting rule. A state is included below if it requires employers to provide paid leave that an employee can use when sick. That sweeps in Illinois, Maine, and Nevada, whose laws grant paid leave for any reason at all, and those three are labeled in the table. Missouri is excluded because its mandate was repealed. Virginia is excluded because its broad law has not started phasing in yet.

State	Accrual rate	Annual use cap	Carryover / bank	Employer size	Waiting period before use
Alaska	1 per 30	56 hrs (15+ emp); 40 hrs (under 15)	Carries over	All employers	Law effective July 1, 2025
Arizona	1 per 30	40 hrs (15+ emp); 24 hrs (under 15)	Up to the annual max	All employers	Up to 90 days permitted
California	1 per 30	40 hrs or 5 days, whichever is greater	Accrual capped at 80 hrs / 10 days	All employers	90 days
Colorado	1 per 30	48 hrs	Up to 48 hrs, no use-it-or-lose-it	All employers	None
Connecticut	1 per 30	40 hrs	Required unless 40 hrs front-loaded	11+ emp; all employers Jan 1, 2027	120 calendar days
District of Columbia	1 per 37 (100+ emp); 1 per 43 (25 to 99, and tipped restaurant staff); 1 per 87 (1 to 24)	7 days / 5 days / 3 days	Carries over	Size-tiered	90 days
Illinois (any reason)	1 per 40	40 hrs	Required under accrual method	Nearly all employers	90 days
Maine (any reason)	1 per 40	40 hrs	Carries over	More than 10 emp	120 days
Maryland	1 per 30	40 hrs	40 hrs carryover, 64-hr total bank	15+ emp paid; under 15 unpaid	106 days
Massachusetts	1 per 30	40 hrs	Up to 40 hrs	11+ emp paid; under 11 unpaid	90 days
Michigan	1 per 30	72 hrs (large); 40 hrs (10 or fewer emp)	Required, may cap at 72 / 40	All employers	120 calendar days (hires after Feb 21, 2025)
Minnesota	1 per 30	48 hrs	Up to an 80-hr bank	All employers	None
Nebraska	1 per 30	56 hrs (20+ emp); 40 hrs (11 to 19)	Carries over	11+ emp; 10 or fewer exempt	Accrual starts after 80 hrs of employment
Nevada (any reason)	0.01923 per hr	40 hrs	Up to 40 hrs	50+ emp; first 2 yrs of business exempt	90 days
New Jersey	1 per 30	40 hrs	Up to 40 hrs	All employers	120 days
New Mexico	1 per 30	64 hrs	Carries over	All employers	None
New York	1 per 30	56 hrs (100+ emp); 40 hrs (5 to 99); unpaid under 5 unless net income tops $1M	Carries over, use may be capped	Size-tiered	None
Oregon	1 per 30	40 hrs	Up to 40 hrs	10+ emp paid (6+ in Portland); under 10 unpaid	90 days
Rhode Island	1 per 35	40 hrs	Carries over	18+ emp paid; under 18 unpaid	Up to 90 days
Vermont	1 per 52	40 hrs	Up to 40 hrs	All employers	Up to 1 year permitted
Washington	1 per 40	No annual use cap	Up to 40 hrs must carry over	All employers	90 calendar days
Missouri	Repealed	Repealed	Repealed	n/a	Requirement ended Aug 28, 2025

This table covers states and DC only. A number of cities run their own ordinances on top of state law, including Seattle, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Portland, and where a city rule is more generous it wins. Check your city as well as your state if you work in one of those metros.

Why Your Balance Is Lower Than Your Math

You multiplied your hours by the decimal, you looked at your stub, and the two numbers do not match. Four things explain nearly every gap, roughly in the order they bite.

1. Your employer’s headcount put you in a lower tier

Size tiers are the single most common surprise. Arizona caps you at 24 hours instead of 40 if your employer has fewer than 15 people. DC changes the rate itself across three tiers, so a small-employer worker earns at 1 per 87 while someone at a 100-person firm earns at 1 per 37, a difference of nearly three to one. New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Rhode Island go further and make the smallest employers provide the leave unpaid. Nebraska, Maine, and Nevada go a step further still and exempt their smallest employers from the law entirely: 10 or fewer employees in Nebraska and Maine, and under 50 in Nevada.

Headcount is usually measured company-wide, not per location, so a small store owned by a large chain often counts as large. If you are near a threshold, ask HR which tier your employer files under.

2. A waiting period is in play, and there are two kinds

Guides tend to lump these together, but they produce completely different stub readings.

An accrual delay means you do not start earning yet. Nebraska is the clear example: accrual begins only after 80 hours of employment, so a new hire’s balance sits at zero through the first two full-time weeks and then starts climbing.

A use delay means you are earning normally but cannot spend the balance. California, Washington, Oregon, and Massachusetts all use 90 calendar days. Connecticut and Michigan use 120. Your stub shows a growing number that payroll will refuse to let you draw on until the clock runs out. If your balance looks right but a sick day got denied, this is usually why.

3. You hit a cap and the meter stopped

Two different ceilings can apply. The annual use cap limits how many hours you can take in a year. A separate bank or carryover cap limits how much total balance you can hold, and once you touch it, further accrual just stops until you spend some down.

Maryland is a good illustration: 40 hours of carryover, but a 64-hour total bank cap. California pairs a 40-hour annual use entitlement with an 80-hour accrual ceiling. If your balance has been frozen at a round number for several pay periods while you kept working, you are almost certainly parked at a cap.

4. Your accrual base excludes some hours

The law usually says “hours worked,” but employer policy sometimes reads that narrowly. Overtime hours, on-call hours, and hours you were paid but not working (holiday pay, vacation, previously used sick time) are the usual candidates for exclusion.

Most mandates do count overtime, so a policy that excludes it may be out of compliance rather than just stingy. To test it, compare a heavy-overtime pay period against a normal one. If a 52-hour week accrued the same as a 40-hour week, the base is capped at 40 somewhere in the system. Our guide to what counts as hours worked covers which hours belong in that base to begin with.

States With No Paid Sick Leave Requirement

There is no federal private-sector mandate. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets rules for minimum wage and overtime but does not require employers to pay for time not worked, sick leave included. That leaves roughly 30 states with no statewide requirement at all.

If you work in one of them, your sick leave is entirely whatever your employer chose to offer. That is not nothing: the Bureau of Labor Statistics found paid sick leave available to 80 percent of private industry workers in 2025, far more than the mandate states alone would produce. It just means your handbook, not your state statute, is the document that governs.

Two states get mislabeled often enough to be worth calling out.

Missouri briefly had a mandate and no longer does. Voters approved Proposition A in November 2024 by nearly 58 percent, the requirement took effect May 1, 2025, HB 567 repealed it on July 10, and the repeal became effective August 28, 2025. The law was live for exactly 17 weeks. Plenty of 2025-vintage compliance tables still list Missouri as a mandate state, and some 2026-dated ones carry it without noting the repeal. Missouri employers may still offer paid sick leave, they simply are not required to.

Pennsylvania appears on several state lists and should not. It has no statewide law. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County run their own ordinances, which is where the confusion comes from, but a worker in Erie or Scranton has no state entitlement.

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What’s Coming: Virginia and the 2027 Phase-In

Two changes are already on the calendar.

Virginia signed its first broad statewide mandate on May 20, 2026 (HB 5 and SB 199). The terms follow the common pattern: 1 hour earned per 30 worked, a 40-hour annual cap, carryover required unless the employer front-loads. The phase-in is staged by employer size. Employers with 50 or more employees are covered starting July 1, 2027. The threshold drops to 25 or more on January 1, 2028, and reaches all employers on January 1, 2029. Until then, Virginia’s only sick leave mandate covers home health workers under consumer-directed Medicaid services, a narrow 2021 law providing 40 hours a year.

Connecticut is finishing a phase-in of its own. Coverage dropped from employers with 25 or more employees to 11 or more on January 1, 2026, and it extends to every employer with at least one employee on January 1, 2027. If your Connecticut employer told you a year ago that the law did not apply, check again.

A couple of smaller 2026 updates round it out. Oregon added blood donation to its list of qualifying reasons on January 1, 2026, with no change to the rate or cap. California also expanded permitted uses on January 1, 2026, and despite what some guides imply, the accrual rate and caps did not change.

Check Your Accrual Against the Hours You Logged

The whole audit takes about five minutes.

1. Pull your total hours worked for the period you want to check. Not your scheduled hours, the hours you actually clocked.
2. Find your state’s decimal in the table above.
3. Multiply. That is your expected accrual for the period.
4. Subtract any sick hours you already used.
5. Compare against the balance printed on your stub.

If the numbers agree within a rounding increment, you are fine. Employers commonly round accrual to the nearest quarter hour or tenth, so small differences are expected. If you are short by more than that, walk the four causes above: tier, waiting period, cap, accrual base. One of them almost always explains it.

If none of them fit, put your calculation in writing and send it to payroll or HR. If that goes nowhere, your state labor department accepts wage and hour complaints, and most mandate states enforce sick leave through the same division that handles unpaid wages.

The step that trips people up is step one. Sick leave accrual is only as accurate as the hours record it runs against, and if your only record is what your employer entered, you have no independent way to check it. That is where keeping your own log pays off. ClockWage44 logs each shift as you work it, so when you need a period total you have your own number to compare against payroll’s. Run the multiplication with the PTO accrual calculator, or add up the shifts first with the timesheet calculator if your hours vary week to week.

One last note on the money side. Sick hours you use are paid as wages and withheld like any other hours on the check, so a sick day at the same rate nets you the same as a worked day. The balance is time, not a separate untaxed benefit.

Related Reading

• What Counts as Hours Worked: which hours belong in your accrual base and which do not
• Overtime Laws by State: the other state-by-state rule set that moves your paycheck
• Final Paycheck Laws When You Quit: what your employer owes you on the way out, and what it does not
• Best Ways to Track Work Hours: building an hours record you can actually audit against
• PTO Accrual Calculator: run the accrual math on your own hours

References

1. U.S. DOL: Vacation and Sick Leave. Confirms the FLSA does not require payment for time not worked.
2. California DIR: Paid Sick Leave. Accrual rate, 90-day use rule, and the 80-hour accrual ceiling.
3. Washington L&I: Paid Sick Leave. 1 per 40 accrual and the 40-hour carryover requirement.
4. New York State: Paid Sick Leave. Employer size tiers, including the unpaid tier under 5 employees.
5. Colorado CDLE: Wage and Hour Laws Including Paid Sick Leave. 48-hour cap and carryover rules.
6. Michigan LEO: Earned Sick Time Act FAQs. The amended 2025 caps for large and small employers.
7. Connecticut DOL: Paid Sick Leave Notice Effective 1/1/2026 (PDF). The 11-employee threshold and 2027 extension.
8. Missouri DOLIR: When Employees Stop Earning Paid Sick Time Under HB 567. The August 28, 2025 repeal date.
9. Illinois DOL: Paid Leave for All Workers Act. 1 per 40 accrual for leave usable for any reason.
10. Minnesota DLI: Earned Sick and Safe Time. 48-hour annual cap and 80-hour bank.
11. Maryland DOL: Healthy Working Families Act FAQs. 15-employee paid threshold and the 64-hour bank cap.
12. Alaska DOLWD: Ballot Measure 1 FAQ (PDF). Accrual and caps under the law effective July 1, 2025.
13. Nebraska DOL: Paid Sick Time FAQs. The 80-hours-of-employment accrual delay.
14. DC DOES: Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act Fact Sheet (PDF). The three employer-size accrual rates.
15. Nevada: NRS 608.0197 Paid Leave Statute (PDF). The 0.01923 per hour rate and 50-employee threshold.
16. New Mexico DWS: Healthy Workplaces Act Reference Guide (PDF). 64-hour annual entitlement.
17. Industrial Commission of Arizona: Wage and Earned Paid Sick Time FAQs. The 40-hour and 24-hour caps split at 15 employees.
18. Maine DOL: Earned Paid Leave. 1 per 40 accrual, 40-hour cap, and the 120-day wait before use.
19. Mass.gov: Earned Sick Time. 1 per 30 accrual and the 11-employee paid threshold.
20. New Jersey DOL: Earned Sick Leave. 1 per 30 accrual, 40-hour cap, employers of all sizes.
21. Oregon BOLI: Sick Time. The 10-employee threshold, the 6-employee Portland rule, and the 90-day wait.
22. Rhode Island DLT: Paid Sick and Safe Leave. 1 per 35 accrual and the 18-employee paid threshold.
23. Vermont DOL: Earned Sick Time FAQ (PDF). 1 per 52 accrual and the up-to-one-year waiting period.
24. Congressional Research Service R48921: Paid Sick Leave in the United States. April 2026 overview of state mandates.
25. BLS: Paid Sick Leave Available to 80 Percent of Private Industry Workers in 2025.
26. SHRM: Missouri Paid Sick Leave Requirement Repealed. Proposition A timeline and HB 567.
27. Groom Law Group: Virginia Expands Paid Sick Leave to Most Employees. HB 5 / SB 199 phase-in dates.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How much sick leave do I earn per hour worked?

Divide 1 by your state's ratio. The most common rule, 1 hour earned per 30 hours worked, comes out to 0.0333 sick hours for every hour you are on the clock, or about one hour of sick time for every four full-time days. Other rates: 1 per 35 is 0.0286, 1 per 40 is 0.025, and 1 per 52 is 0.0192. Multiply the hours you actually worked in the period by that decimal and you have your expected accrual before any cap.

Which states require paid sick leave in 2026?

Twenty states plus the District of Columbia: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. That count includes Illinois, Maine, and Nevada, which require paid leave usable for any reason rather than sick leave specifically. Virginia has a broad law signed in May 2026, but it does not start phasing in until July 2027.

Does Missouri still require paid sick leave?

No. Missouri voters approved Proposition A in November 2024 and the requirement took effect on May 1, 2025, but Governor Kehoe signed HB 567 on July 10, 2025 and the repeal took effect August 28, 2025. The mandate was live for about 17 weeks. Missouri employers may still offer paid sick leave voluntarily, and hours you banked during that window are now governed by your employer's own policy rather than state law.

Why is my sick leave balance lower than I calculated?

Four things cause most gaps. Your employer's headcount may put you in a lower tier with a smaller cap or an unpaid entitlement. A waiting period may have delayed when accrual started or when you could use the balance. You may have hit an annual use cap or a lifetime bank cap, which quietly stops the meter. Or your employer may exclude certain hours, such as overtime, on-call, or paid time off already taken, from the accrual base.

Do part-time employees accrue paid sick leave?

Yes, proportionally, in every mandate state. The ratio runs against hours worked, not against your employment status, so a part-timer earns at exactly the same rate per hour as a full-timer and simply accumulates more slowly. A 20-hour week at 1 per 30 produces roughly 34.7 hours over a year, versus 69.3 hours at 40 hours a week. A few states set an unpaid entitlement instead of a paid one at the smallest employers.

Does overtime count toward sick leave accrual?

Most state mandates accrue on all hours worked, which includes overtime hours. The details vary by state, though, and some employers apply a narrower policy than the law allows. If your accrual seems flat in a week where you worked well past 40 hours, the accrual base is the first thing to check in your employee handbook, then against your state labor department's guidance.

Does unused sick leave carry over, and do I get paid for it when I leave?

Carryover is required in nearly every mandate state, though it is usually capped at the annual accrual maximum or at a separate bank limit. Payout at separation is a different question. Statutory sick leave generally does not have to be cashed out when you quit or are fired, even in states that do require vacation payout. California is the standard example of that split: accrued vacation is wages, accrued sick leave is not.

Is paid sick leave taxed differently from regular pay?

No. When you use sick hours from an employer-provided balance, those hours are paid as wages and withheld exactly like any other hours on the same check: federal income tax, state income tax where it applies, and FICA. The line item on your stub may be labeled separately for tracking, but nothing about the withholding math changes. Your net pay for a sick day should look like your net pay for a worked day at the same rate.