Benefits of Paid Parental Leave: Health, Child Development, and Wages

Paid parental leave — time off from work with continued wages after a birth or adoption — produces measurable gains in infant and maternal health, child development into adulthood, family earnings, workforce retention, and long-run economic returns, with the benefits of paid parental leave falling most heavily on lower-income families who otherwise cannot afford to take time off. Two decades of research from state programs like California’s and national programs abroad have put numbers on nearly every one of those effects.

Healthier Births and Healthier Infants

Children whose mothers have access to paid leave are 6.6% less likely to be born preterm and 10% less likely to have low birth weight.¹ A study of roughly 300,000 births across twenty low- and middle-income countries found that each additional month of paid maternity leave was associated with 7.9 fewer infant deaths per 1,000 live births, a 13% relative reduction concentrated in the post-neonatal period.² A separate analysis of 141 countries found that ten additional weeks of paid maternal leave was associated with a 10% lower infant mortality rate.³

The health effects last past infancy. Elementary-age children of California mothers who had access to leave showed lower rates of obesity, ADHD, hearing problems, and recurrent ear infections.⁴ Hospital admissions for abusive head trauma among children under two also declined in California after the state’s paid family leave program took effect.¹

Vaccinations are more likely to happen on schedule when a parent is home. California’s program reduced late infant vaccinations by roughly five percentage points, with stronger effects for families below the poverty line.⁵ Internationally, each additional week of paid maternity leave increased DTP vaccine uptake by 1.4 to 2.2 percentage points.⁶

Longer and More Consistent Breastfeeding

Paid leave increases both how many mothers start breastfeeding and how long they continue. A review of 21 studies confirmed a consistent positive relationship between leave length and breastfeeding duration, and the size of the effect is larger for Black women, women with less education, and women in lower-income households — groups that generally breastfeed for shorter periods.⁷ After California introduced paid family leave in 2004, breastfeeding at three, six, and nine months rose roughly 16 to 18 percentage points compared with other states.⁸ Access to paid leave extends breastfeeding by up to 18 days for the general population and up to 65 days for economically disadvantaged mothers.¹

Maternal Mental and Physical Health

Paid leave is linked to a nearly 30% reduction in depressive symptoms among mothers with infants.¹ A 2023 systematic review in The Lancet Public Health pulling together 45 studies found that more generous parental leave was associated with fewer depressive symptoms, lower psychological distress, and less burnout in mothers, along with lower mental health-care utilization — a sign that leave may prevent conditions from developing in the first place.⁹

CDC research found a U-shaped relationship between leave duration and postpartum depression, with symptoms lowest at around six months of leave. The same research noted that the twelve weeks of unpaid leave under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act may not be sufficient for mothers at risk of postpartum depression, and that many younger and lower-income women cannot afford to take unpaid leave at all.¹⁰ The costs of leaving that burden untreated are large. One estimate put the untreated postpartum mental health cost at $14 billion for U.S. births in 2017 alone.⁹

Long-Term Child Development

Some of the strongest evidence for paid leave is what shows up years later. A study of 328 toddlers found that paid maternity leave was associated with significantly higher language scores compared with unpaid leave, and among mothers with lower education, paid leave was also linked to fewer behavioral problems.¹¹

A study of a 1979 German reform that expanded maternity leave from two to six months found that children born after the reform were 1.7% less likely to be hospitalized as adults and had significantly fewer diagnoses of mental and behavioral disorders, with estimated health-cost savings of 6.6 million euros per birth cohort per year. That same research pointed to longer leave being linked with higher cognitive test scores, lower high school dropout rates, and higher earnings at age thirty. A study of a 2002 Danish reform found that longer parental leave raised adolescent conscientiousness, emotional stability, and well-being and reduced school absenteeism and psychiatric diagnoses.¹²

What Fathers Taking Leave Changes

Fathers who take at least two weeks of paid leave after a child’s birth show higher caregiving involvement nine months later, a pattern associated with better educational attainment and emotional stability in children.¹³ Paternity leave is also linked to reduced maternal stress, lower risk of postpartum depression, and greater relationship stability.

When fathers take leave, household work is divided more evenly, and mothers’ labor force participation rises with it. Swedish research found that paternity leave can increase a mother’s wages by nearly 7%.¹³ Fathers’ use of leave has grown in the U.S.: the share of first-time fathers taking paid leave rose to about 50% in the 2014–2022 period, up from less than a quarter in earlier decades.¹⁴ In California, men’s child-bonding claims climbed from 15% of total claims in 2004 to over 50%.

How leave is structured matters. Men are significantly less likely to use leave when it is unpaid or offers low wage replacement, and individual non-transferable entitlements produce higher father uptake than shared pools couples can split. Iceland’s “use it or lose it” father quota, phased in starting in 2000, brought fathers to roughly a third of all parental leave days. When Iceland lowered its benefit ceiling after the 2008 financial crisis, average days taken by fathers fell from 101 to 86.¹⁵

What Employers See

Firm-level data from California, the first state to require paid family leave, showed turnover rates falling after the program took effect while wage costs did not rise. Firm productivity rose by an average of 5%, and firms saw 4.6% greater revenue and 6.8% greater profit per full-time employee. Over 70% of California small-business owners said the program helped them compete with larger firms, and 99% of businesses surveyed described the effect on morale as positive or neutral.¹⁶

Individual companies have reported large retention gains. Google saw attrition among new mothers drop 50% after extending leave from twelve to eighteen weeks. Accenture reported a 40% drop after doubling leave from eight to sixteen weeks. Aetna’s rate of women returning to work after maternity leave rose from 77% to 91% after an expansion.¹⁷ Replacing a worker costs an employer an estimated 21–24% of that person’s salary, and up to 150% in some industries, so retention alone can offset the cost of providing leave.¹⁶p>

A 2017 Ernst and Young survey found that more than 90% of companies with paid family leave policies reported a positive or neutral effect on both productivity and morale.¹⁷ Studies in New York and New Jersey found that most businesses, regardless of size, had little trouble adjusting to paid leave requirements.¹⁶

Return on Public Investment

A 2024 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tallied the costs and benefits of a public paid parental leave program using quasi-experimental data from California and Norway. The researchers estimated that every $1,000 invested in paid leave produces $7,275 in net social benefits under conservative assumptions, or $29,406 using mean estimates from existing literature. The gains came from three main sources: improvements in mothers’ long-term health (valued at $10,491 to $33,063 per mother over a lifetime), improvements in children’s health through age 21 ($8,260 to $9,557 per child), and a roughly 5% increase in children’s earnings at age 30.¹⁸

The authors simulated a national four-week program costing under $2 billion initially and projected $13 billion to $55 billion in long-term net social benefits. A twelve-week program would scale costs and benefits roughly 3.7 times higher. The authors said their figures were likely underestimates, since they excluded categories such as reduced crime, lower foster care spending, and long-term tax revenue.¹⁸

Narrowing the Wage Gap

Paid leave keeps mothers attached to their jobs at a moment when many otherwise leave the workforce or cut hours permanently. New mothers who take paid leave are 54% more likely to report a wage increase in the year after a birth.¹⁹ Research by Berger and Waldfogel found that access to paid leave makes women 40% more likely to return to work after childbirth, and California data showed paid family leave led to a 10–17% increase in weekly work hours for mothers of toddlers.²⁰

Federal Reserve analysis of New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program found that in areas with greater coverage, the employment gap between men and women narrowed by 3.3% of a standard deviation, with women’s employment rising by 6% of a standard deviation more than men’s after the program took effect.²¹ Families currently lose an estimated $22.5 billion in wages annually because of inadequate or nonexistent paid leave, and women over 50 who leave the workforce to care for aging parents forgo an average of more than $324,000 in wages and retirement savings.¹⁹

Closing Racial and Economic Gaps

Access to paid leave in the U.S. is deeply unequal. Only 25% of Latino workers and 43% of Black workers have access to any paid or partially paid parental leave, compared with 50% of white workers.²² A Bay Area study found that Black women received an average of 3.6 fewer full-pay-equivalent weeks of leave than white women, and 68% of Black women received no pay from their employers during leave, compared with 45% of white women.²³ Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirms that Hispanic workers face persistent gaps even after controlling for demographic and employment characteristics.²⁴

Universal, publicly funded programs have narrowed these gaps. After California’s program launched, leave-taking increased most among non-white, unmarried, and non-college-educated mothers.²⁴ Health benefits of leave, including breastfeeding rates, infant survival, and reduced childhood health conditions, are consistently larger among disadvantaged families.¹

Where U.S. Law Currently Stands

There is no national paid parental leave guarantee in the United States. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act provides up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for the birth or placement of a child, and only for employees with at least twelve months of service, 1,250 hours in the preceding year, and a workplace of fifty or more employees within seventy-five miles.²⁵ Because the leave is unpaid, many workers who qualify still cannot afford to use it.

Federal civilian employees receive up to twelve administrative workweeks of paid parental leave under the Federal Employee Paid Leave Act, effective for qualifying events on or after October 1, 2020, and must agree to a twelve-week work obligation after leave ends.²⁶ Active-duty service members receive twelve weeks of non-chargeable parental leave under the Military Parental Leave Program, effective December 27, 2022, with birth parents also receiving roughly six weeks of convalescent leave.²⁷

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have enacted mandatory paid family leave programs, funded primarily through payroll taxes. Most use a sliding-scale wage replacement that covers 90% or more of wages for lower earners, with maximum weekly benefits ranging from roughly $900 in Delaware to over $1,700 in Washington in 2026. Maine began paying benefits in May 2026, and Maryland’s program is scheduled to begin in January 2028.²⁸ Another ten states have voluntary systems that allow employers to purchase paid leave coverage through private insurers.²⁹ Whether a given family sees any of the benefits documented above still depends heavily on which state they live in and who employs them.

1
SRCD. Paid Family and Medical Leave Improves Well-Being Children and Families
2
PLOS Medicine. Increased Duration of Paid Maternity Leave Lowers Infant Mortality in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
3
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Paid Maternity Leave and Child Mortality
4
National Partnership for Women and Families. Paid Leave Research
5
ScienceDirect. The Impact of Paid Family Leave on the Timely Vaccination of Infants
6
ScienceDirect. Paid Maternity Leave and Childhood Vaccination Uptake
7
SAGE Journals. Maternity Leave and Its Impact on Breastfeeding: A Review of the Literature
8
National Center for Biotechnology Information. State Paid Family Leave Policies and Breastfeeding Duration
9
The Lancet Public Health. The Effect of Parental Leave on Parents’ Mental Health
10
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Maternity Leave Duration and Postpartum Health
11
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Paid Maternal Leave Is Associated With Better Language and Socioemotional Outcomes During Toddlerhood
12
ScienceDirect. Maternity Leave and Long-Term Health Outcomes
13
National Partnership for Women and Families. Fathers Need Paid Leave
14
U.S. Census Bureau. Parental Leave
15
Nordics.info. Nordic Parental Leave Policy: The Case of Iceland
16
National Partnership for Women and Families. Paid Leave: Good for Business
17
New America. Paid Family Leave: Economic Impact
18
National Bureau of Economic Research. The Benefits and Costs of Paid Parental Leave in the United States
19
National Partnership for Women and Families. Paid Leave Will Help Close the Gender Wage Gap
20
Bipartisan Policy Center. Why America Needs a National Paid Parental Leave Policy
21
Federal Reserve Board. Maternity Leave and the Gender Wage Gap
22
National Partnership for Women and Families. Paid Family and Medical Leave: A Racial Justice Issue and Opportunity
23
National Center for Biotechnology Information. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Paid Parental Leave Access
24
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Access to and Use of Paid Family and Medical Leave
25
U.S. Department of Labor. Family and Medical Leave Act
26
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Paid Parental Leave
27
My Army Benefits. Military Parental Leave Program
28
New America. Paid Leave Benefits and Funding in the United States
29
NCSL. State Family and Medical Leave Laws