Minnesota Amends Leave Law to Expand Prenatal Care Coverage

Effective August 1, 2024, Minnesota’s Parenting and Parental Leave Act has been amended to provide that an employee’s parental leave entitlement cannot be reduced by any paid or unpaid leave taken for prenatal care medical appointments. The amendment may signal the start of a trend: just recently, New York enacted a law providing paid leave specific to prenatal care.

Under MN’s law, an employee’s leave entitlement may be reduced by any period of paid parental, disability, personal, medical or sick leave, or accrued vacation provided by the employer so that the leave does not exceed 12 weeks, unless agreed to by the employer. The leave entitlement may also be reduced for any reason for which an employee can take FMLA leave. 

What the amendment says

The amendment to the law says that “the length of leave provided [under the law] must not be reduced by any period of paid or unpaid leave taken for prenatal care medical appointments.”

The law does not require that an employer provide any separate bank of leave for medical care appointments. However, employees may be able to take the time away from work to the extent available under other laws (including the FMLA) or the employer’s policies.

What the amendment means is that if the employer provides time away from work for prenatal care, the employer must not reduce the employee’s MN parental leave entitlement by that amount. Parental leave time must remain untouched until the employee actually has their baby and takes time off for bonding or needs leave for another reason for which leave can be deducted.

What about the FMLA?

Minnesota’s amendment is a deviation from how leave has traditionally worked under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. An FMLA-eligible employee taking time away from work due to pregnancy would have that leave counted against their total FMLA entitlement. So, an employee who used a total of one workweek of leave due to pregnancy (including prenatal appointments) would have 11 weeks of leave left in that FMLA year to bond with the child. 

Prior to this amendment, Minnesota law aligned with the FMLA. An employee who took time off under the state’s Parenting and Parental Leave Act would have that time counted against their entitlement. Under the new amendment, employers cannot count time off for prenatal care medical appointments against the MN state law entitlement. Rather, that bank of leave will need to sit untouched until the baby is born. 

Potential next steps

Employers may consider a few steps in light of the new amendment to MN law:

• Communicate new policies. When MN employees announce their pregnancy, their employer may want to communicate the rights available under MN law by telling the employees that any time off granted for prenatal care will not be counted against the MN leave entitlement.

• Track time off carefully. When an employee takes time off for prenatal care, it should be counted against the employee’s FMLA entitlement, but not against the employee’s MN state law entitlement. While the FMLA and state laws typically run concurrently, that will not be the case for employees in MN. Employers may want to check that their leave management software or processes are tracking the time away appropriately and not counting time away for prenatal appointments against MN parental leave.

EquiLeave will continue to monitor the development of MN’s paid parental leave law and provide updates.