Skip to Content
Logo
Menu
  • About Our Firm
  • Practice Areas
  • Our People
  • Learning Library
  • Corporate Transparency Act
  • Contact
  • Make A Payment

If You Provide Sick Leave — It Must Include Personal Care of Certain Family Members.

If You Provide Sick Leave — It Must Include Personal Care of Certain Family Members.

May 13, 2021

Most employers provide paid sick leave or PTO as a standard benefit. But paid sick leave is not legally required in Illinois with the exception of Cook County. Paradoxically, if your business does provide paid sick leave, that leave is regulated by Illinois law.

Governor Pritzker recently signed House Bill 158, a massive healthcare reform bill meant to reduce inequities in Illinois health care, into law. Among other things, House Bill 158 amends the Employee Sick Leave Act (ESLA) to cover leave for “personal care” of an employee’s children, parents, step-parents, in-laws, and grandparents(“qualifying family members”). This new law takes effect immediately.

ESLA is a state law that requires employers to permit employees to use a portion of their sick leave to care for their qualifying family members for “absences due to anillness, injury, or medical appointment” for reasonable periods of time pursuant to the same terms the employee would be allowed to take that sick leave for their own illness, injury, or medical appointment.

ESLA gives employers discretion to limit an employee’s use of sick leave to care for relatives to half of their accrued sick leave. Moreover, the ESLA only applies to employers who already provide sick leave; it does not create an independent obligation in employers to offer sick leave.

Prior to House Bill 158, the ESLA exclusively defined “personal sick leave” as “time accrued and available to an employee to be used as a result of absence from work due to personal illness, injury, or medical appointment”.

HB 158 expands this definition to include absences for “personal care” activities that ensure that a qualifying family member’s basic medical, hygiene, nutritional, or safety needs are met, to provide transportation to medical appointments for qualifying family members who are unable to transport themselves, and to offer emotional support to qualifying family members with serious health conditions receiving inpatient or home care.

While the ESLA does not require employers to offer employees sick leave, collective bargaining agreements, the Family Medical Leave Act, certain county ordinances, or other relevant laws may.

Employer Takeaways

House Bill 158 will not have much practical effect on Illinois employers because most employers interpret their sick leave policies liberally. This legislation does serve as an important reminder, however, that employers should use their leave policies as a way to keep and attract new talent. The American work force is getting older. Women are dropping out of the workforce to care for children and others as a result of the pandemic. Now is the time for Illinois employers to be proactive with their leave policies – if they can – in order to keep good employees and attract new ones.

Related Attorneys

Clingen Callow & McLean, LLC
Lisle Office
2300 Cabot Drive, Suite 500
Lisle, Illinois, 60532
Phone 630.871.2600
Geneva Office
21 North 4th Street
Geneva, Illinois, 60134
Phone 630.938.4769
Fax 630.871.9869
General Inquires [email protected]
  • facebook
  • linkedin

Contact Us

©2025 Clingen Callow & McLean, LLC. All rights reserved.

Law Firm Web Design by NMC

Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}