FMLA Duration: 12 Weeks, 26 Weeks, and Intermittent Leave

Under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act, FMLA leave lasts up to 12 workweeks in a 12-month period for most qualifying reasons, and up to 26 workweeks in a single 12-month period if you are caring for a covered servicemember with a serious injury or illness.¹ Those are federal minimums. An employer can offer more but cannot offer less. How much of that time is actually available to you at any given moment depends on how your employer measures the 12-month window, whether you take the leave in a single block or in pieces, and how many hours you normally work.

The Two Ceilings

The standard entitlement is 12 workweeks in a 12-month period. It covers the birth of a child and bonding with a newborn, placement of a child through adoption or foster care, caring for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition, your own serious health condition that prevents you from doing your job, and qualifying exigencies related to a family member’s military deployment.¹

The higher ceiling of 26 workweeks applies only to military caregiver leave. If you are the spouse, child, parent, or next of kin of a servicemember with a serious injury or illness incurred or aggravated during active duty, you get up to 26 workweeks in a single 12-month period. This is the longest leave FMLA provides, and its 12-month clock works differently from the standard entitlement, described below.

How the 12-Month Window Is Measured

Your 12 weeks does not automatically match the calendar year. Your employer selects one of four methods for tracking the 12-month period, and the choice determines when your balance resets.²

The calendar year runs from January 1 through December 31. Any unused leave expires on New Year’s Eve, and a new 12 weeks becomes available on January 1.
A fixed 12-month period uses a consistent start date the employer picks, such as its fiscal year or your hire anniversary. The 12 weeks resets on that date each year.
The forward method starts the 12-month clock on the first day you use FMLA leave. A new 12-month period begins the next time you take FMLA leave after the first one expires.
The rolling lookback measures backward 12 months from the date of each new leave request and subtracts whatever FMLA leave you have already used inside that window. Whatever remains of the 12 weeks is your available balance.

The rolling lookback closes an opening the other three methods leave: stacking weeks at the end of one period against the start of the next to take close to 24 consecutive weeks off. Under a rolling calculation, if you used eight weeks starting in February, you would have only four weeks available until the following February, when those original eight weeks begin dropping off the lookback window. Whichever method your employer chooses must apply the same way to every employee in the organization.

The 26-Week Clock Works Differently

Military caregiver leave uses its own single 12-month period that starts on the first day you take that leave, regardless of which method your employer uses for regular FMLA. The 26 weeks is a combined ceiling for all FMLA leave during that period. If you take 10 weeks for your own serious health condition inside the window, you would have 16 weeks left for caregiving. You still cannot exceed 12 weeks total for any non-caregiver reason within the 26-week window.³ Unused military caregiver leave does not carry over once that 12-month period ends.

Qualifying exigency leave for a family member’s deployment is different again. It draws from the same 12-week standard entitlement rather than from the 26-week caregiver ceiling.¹

Intermittent Leave Stretches the Weeks

You do not have to take all 12 or 26 weeks in one block. When a medical need is best handled through periodic absences — recurring treatments, physical therapy, chronic flare-ups — you can take FMLA leave in separate segments or on a reduced schedule.⁴ Intermittent leave for bonding with a healthy newborn or newly placed child needs the employer’s agreement; intermittent leave for a pregnancy-related health condition does not.

Only the time you actually miss counts against your balance. If you normally work 40 hours a week and drop to 20 hours for medical reasons, each week on that schedule uses half a week of FMLA leave. The 12-week entitlement would stretch across 24 calendar weeks at that rate.

Employers must track intermittent leave in an increment no larger than the shortest period they use for any other form of leave, and that increment can never exceed one hour.⁵ If your company tracks sick time in 15-minute blocks, it must track FMLA leave the same way. One narrow exception can cost you more time than expected: if the physical nature of your job makes it impossible to start or end work mid-shift, such as an assembly line or an airline flight, your employer can count the entire period you are forced to be absent as FMLA leave.

Part-Time and Variable Schedules

Part-time employees get the same number of protected workweeks as full-time employees; the weeks are just shorter. If your hours vary week to week and no one can predict them with certainty, your employer must calculate a weekly average from the hours you were scheduled over the 12 months before your leave began, including weeks in which you used vacation or sick time.⁵ From there the math runs in fractions. If your average workweek is 30 hours and you miss 15, you have used half a week.

Mandatory overtime counts. If your employer requires overtime and you miss those hours for an FMLA-qualifying reason, they come out of your balance. Voluntary overtime you decline because of your condition does not count.⁶

Holidays and Shutdowns

If you are out for a full workweek and a holiday falls during that week, the whole week still counts as one week of FMLA leave. If you are on intermittent leave and the holiday is a day you were not scheduled to work, that day does not count against your balance.²

Longer closures work in your favor. If your employer shuts operations for one or more full weeks, such as a school’s summer break or a factory’s annual retooling, those weeks do not count against your FMLA entitlement at all, because you would not have been expected to work. For teachers and seasonal workers, this can effectively pause the FMLA clock.

Spouses Working for the Same Employer

If you and your spouse both work for the same company, your employer can limit you to a combined 12 weeks (not 12 weeks each) when the leave is for the birth or placement of a child or to care for a parent with a serious health condition.⁷ The shared cap applies even if you and your spouse work in different offices.

The shared limit only covers those specific reasons. Each spouse still gets a full individual 12 weeks for their own serious health condition or to care for a child or spouse with a serious health condition. If both spouses use six weeks for newborn bonding, each would still have six weeks available for other qualifying reasons in the same leave year.

You Have to Be Eligible in the First Place

None of these durations apply to you unless you clear three eligibility requirements. You must have worked for your employer for at least 12 months, logged at least 1,250 hours in those 12 months, and work at a location where your employer has 50 or more employees within a 75-mile radius.⁸ The 12 months do not have to be consecutive; a gap in service still counts as long as it does not exceed seven years in most cases. The 1,250-hour threshold works out to roughly 24 hours per week over a full year, based on actual hours worked rather than hours paid. Public agencies and public or private elementary and secondary schools are covered regardless of employee count.⁹

FMLA Leave Is Unpaid

The 12 or 26 weeks the law guarantees is job-protected time, not paid time. Your employer is not required to pay you while you are on FMLA leave.¹ You can choose to substitute accrued paid leave — vacation, personal days, or sick time — and your employer can also require you to use that paid time. Either way, the paid leave runs concurrently with FMLA leave, not on top of it.¹⁰ Four weeks of paid vacation used during FMLA leave means four of your 12 FMLA weeks are gone too. Some states run paid family leave programs that provide partial wage replacement during time off that also qualifies as FMLA leave; those state benefits generally run concurrently with FMLA.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 2612 – Leave Requirement
2
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.200 – Amount of Leave
3
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.127 – Leave to Care for a Covered Servicemember with a Serious Injury or Illness
4
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.202 – Intermittent Leave or Reduced Leave Schedule
5
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.205 – Increments of FMLA Leave for Intermittent or Reduced Schedule Leave
6
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 28I – Counting Leave Use under the Family and Medical Leave Act
7
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.120 – Leave for Birth, Placement, and to Care for a Child with a Serious Health Condition
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 2611 – Definitions
9
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet 28 – The Family and Medical Leave Act
10
eCFR. 29 CFR 825.207 – Substitution of Paid Leave