As you’ve probably heard, the final regulations for the Massachusetts Paid Family and Medical Leave law were released on June 18. In addition, there were a few notable changes leading up to the final regulations:
- There is a 3 month delay for the contributions and employee notices.
- The contribution rate has increased to 0.75%.
- The overall start date was not impacted. Benefits will still be payable on January 1, 2021.
If you already had your employees sign the notification, the Department website suggests the following:
“If you provided written notices to your workforce prior to the June 14 delay announcement, you will need to provide them with a rate update sheet explaining the new dates and contribution rates. This sheet doesn’t have to be signed by the covered individuals but you’ll need to keep a record of its distribution.”
You can find the updated poster and notices here: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/informing-your-workforce-about-paid-family-and-medical-leave
Next steps:
- Hang up the revised PFML poster.
- Understand the contribution rates and decide how much your company will contribute, if anything.
- Notify your employees about the law before September 30.
- Talk to your payroll company to be sure they are ready to begin withholding the employee contributions and remitting the payments through the MassTaxConnect system.
- If you’d like to consider applying for an exemption, that needs to be done before December 20, 2019.
We communicate with the life and disability insurance companies every week or two to see if they have any exemption-eligible products in the pipeline. I spoke to several carriers this week. Here were some responses:
- One said they will have a self-insured product available for companies with 50 or more employees.
- Another said they will have something similar with no minimum number of employees.
- Another company is working on an insured product now.
- Three companies said they plan to have a product available at some point, but no details are available yet.
- Finally, one of the carriers is ready today to quote both fully insured and self-insured products that will qualify an employer for an exemption. They have 2 exemptions approved so far. They require 100 employees and some piece of insured life or disability business to go along with it.
If you’d like to talk about the possibility of applying for an exemption or the merits of self-insuring all or a portion of the PFML, please call us at (866) 724-0008 or click the link below.
