How to apply for intermittent paid family or medical leave online

There is a process you need to follow when applying for medical leave or family leave to bond with a child on an intermittent schedule.

Intermittent Family Leave to Bond with a Child

In this example, you would like to periodically take paid family leave between 7/01/2022 - 11/1/2022.

You aren’t sure if you will need to take leave every week or every month so you select “Irregular over the next six months” for your estimated frequency. You anticipate you’ll need to take a full day off work 4 times during your leave, so you enter 4 as the number of absences per month, at least a day, and enter 8 as the number of hours you’ll miss per absence.

You will receive an error because your duration of leave, 5 months, is less than the frequency you selected, which is irregular over the next 6 months.

There are 2 ways to resolve the this:

1. You can extend the start or end date of your intermittent leave so that the duration of paid family leave that you are applying for is at least six months. For example, instead of 7/1/2022 to 11/1/2022, change your leave duration to 7/1/2022 to 1/1/2023.

2. You can change the frequency of your intermittent leave to “At least once a month.” In this solution, you may need to also edit the number of absences you are applying for. When you change your estimated frequency to “At least once a month,” instead of having 4 absences over the next 6 months, you will have 1 absence per month.

Intermittent Medical Leave

In this example, you are recovering from an illness and occasionally experience extreme fatigue that prevents you from working effectively. Your health care provider will have filled out a Certification of a Serious Health Condition form outlining the need for intermittent medical leave to manage your condition, and how frequently they expect this need to occur.

They state that they don’t expect you to need to take paid medical leave every week, or even every month, and that they will re-evaluate your condition after 3 months. Your Certification of a Serious Health Condition form states that your leave will be 3 months long, and contain up to 5 absences over the next 6 months.

Using the information from your health care provider, you enter the 3-month-long date.

You then select that your leave will be “Irregular over the next 6 months,” that you will have 5 absences over the next 6 months, that an absence will typically last at least a day, and that you will miss 1 day of work per absence. 

This will create an error because your 3-month duration of leave is less than the 6-month frequency you have selected.

There are 2 ways to resolve this:

1. You can extend the start or end date of your intermittent leave duration, so that the overall duration of medical leave that you are applying for is at least 6 months. For example, instead of 7/1/2022 to 9/30/2022, change your leave duration to 9/1/2022 to 12/31/2022.

2. You can change the frequency of intermittent leave to “At least once a month.” You may need to also edit the number of absences you are applying for. When you change your estimated frequency to “At least once a month,” instead of having 5 absences over the next 6 months, you will have 1 absence per month.

In both of these solutions, the frequency of intermittent leave in your application will not match what your health care provider has outlined in your Certification of a Serious Health Condition form. A reviewer will need to update your leave details based on what your health care provider outlined as part of the application review process.