Department of Sociology

he birth of a child or a serious health condition can make balancing work and family obligations especially challenging.

While the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 provides unpaid leave for employees who work in companies with 50 or more, paid benefits are up to the employer. As such, some states have enacted universal state-run programs to offer these benefits, while others, including New Hampshire, have implemented a voluntary approach through state-private partnerships.

A new policy brief by Kristin Smith, visiting research associate professor of sociology, finds that the New Hampshire Voluntary Paid Family and Medical Leave Program has had a very limited impact in helping workers.

Through the state’s contract with MetLife, since its launch in 2023, the New Hampshire program enables workers to take up to six weeks of leave for qualifying family and medical needs and receive 60% of their wages.

New Hampshire offers three types of plans:

• Through the employee group plan, employers can opt in anytime and the premiums are either paid by the employer, the employee, or a combination of the two.
• With the individual plan, individuals can opt in during a two-month sign-up period currently underway (between Dec. 1, 2025, and Jan. 29, 2026) if their employer does not offer this type of paid leave but must pay a $5 weekly premium and wait seven months until they can submit a claim.
• The New Hampshire state employee plan automatically enrolls full-time state employees and covers the premiums, so the benefits are free for this group.

The policy brief reports that only about 3% of New Hampshire workers were enrolled in the PFML program in its first two-and-a-half-years. By the end of its second year, at the end of 2024, 18,450 workers were enrolled with active policies and eligible to receive wage replacement benefits.

Participation rates in 2023 were highest among state employees with nearly 8,900 workers enrolled. In the private sector, 5,400 workers were in the employee-sponsored plans, and just under 500 were in the individual plans.

“Larger firms typically have higher-valued workers with higher education and higher pay, so firms want to retain them, but workers with low education, low earnings, women, and those who work part-time have much less access to paid family and medical leave,” says Smith, who is also director of the Class of 1964 Policy Research Shop at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy.

In 2024, only 300 of New Hampshire’s 46,500 companies participated in the program, or less than 1%.

“The N.H. Voluntary Paid Family and Medical Leave Program has done very little at the state level to increase these benefits and has not made a dent in overcoming existing inequities,” says Smith.

And even if they were covered, the benefits may not be enough. More than half of employed female workers indicated that six weeks of paid leave is too low.

The results from the brief show that less than one in five workers in New Hampshire had heard about the program between 2022 and 2024, and Smith cites lack of awareness as one reason for low enrollment.

Prior research has found that workers who do not take family or medical leave are unable to afford it and/or are afraid of losing their job.

“For workers that are struggling to make ends meet, receiving only 60% of your wages during leave is just not an option,” says Smith, who is also a senior fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

By comparison, through the Connecticut Paid Leave Program, workers in Connecticut can qualify for up to 12 weeks of paid leave, receiving up to 95% of their average weekly earnings up to a capped amount or more, depending on their earnings. They pay a premium of 0.5% of their wages up to a capped limit.

“If your goal is to broaden access and extend benefits, a better model would be to adopt a comprehensive program similar to what’s in place in 14 states, including Massachusetts and Rhode Island,” says Smith. “These programs typically cover most workers, provide benefits for a longer period of time and at a greater percentage of a worker’s earnings than the New Hampshire voluntary program.”

The brief draws on Granite State Poll data from the UNH Survey Center of 500-750 households from each of the surveys collected in winter 2016, October 2018, and December 2022, 2023, and 2024, and is part of the UNH Carsey Brief series.