Effective March 29, 2021, California employers with more than 25 employees must provide up to 80 hours of paid sick leave for certain COVID-19-related reasons. The new law, Senate Bill 95 (adding Labor Code Sections 248.2 and 248.3), is retroactive to sick leave taken beginning January 1, 2021. The law will expire on September 30, 2021.
Last year, California enacted a COVID-19 paid sick leave law that applied to employers with 500 or more employees, and which expired on December 31, 2020. The new California COVID-19 supplemental paid sick leave law (“Supplemental Sick Leave”) requires any business with more than 25 employees to provide Supplemental Sick Leave that is in addition to paid sick leave that the employee is already entitled to under other applicable laws (or previously took under the prior California COVID-19 sick leave law).
Full-time employees are entitled to 80 hours of Supplemental Sick Leave, and part-time employees are entitled to an amount of leave that correlates with: (1) the number of hours the employee regularly works over a two-week period, or (2) if the employee works a variable number of hours, 14 times the average number of hours the employee worked each day in the six months preceding the date the employee took Supplemental Sick Leave.