Research · 9 min read
Your benefits are the law. Whether you claim them depends on your employer.
By Christine · Published July 22, 2026
There is a study I keep coming back to, and it explains something I could not put my finger on for a long time.
Four economists, including researchers at Stanford and UC Santa Barbara, got access to California's administrative records for its Disability Insurance and Paid Family Leave programs. Not survey answers. The actual claims. Then they looked at who filed them.
What they found is that program take-up is deeply unequal, and the thing predicting it is not what you would guess. It is not the worker's own income. It is the firm they happen to work for. Specifically, at companies that pay a wage premium, meaning they pay above market rate for comparable workers, the claim rate was 57 percent higher for a one standard deviation increase in that premium.
The paper is called Unequal Use of Social Insurance Benefits: The Role of Employers. It was published in the Journal of Econometrics.
Read that finding again, because the implication is stark. Two people can have identical entitlements under identical state law. One works at a company with a well-run benefits team. The other works somewhere that has never walked anyone through this. The first one files. The second one often does not.
The benefit is not the same as the benefit received
We talk about paid leave as though passing the law finishes the job. Your state creates a program, you become entitled to it, and the money arrives.
But entitlement and receipt are two different things, separated by a filing process, a set of deadlines, and a pile of things you have to know exist before you can ask about them. Every one of those steps is a place to fall out.
The research puts a number on how much your workplace determines whether you make it through. And the mechanism is not mysterious. Think about what a well-resourced employer actually provides:
- Someone whose job includes telling you the state program exists
- A benefits portal where the disability plan is visible rather than buried
- Colleagues who have done this before and will tell you what they did
- A culture where asking about leave does not feel like advertising that you are less committed
- Sometimes, an actual leave administrator who files things for you
Now picture the same pregnancy at a 40-person company where HR is one person who also runs payroll and recruiting, is not a benefits specialist, and has genuinely never been asked this question before. Nobody is hiding anything from you. There is simply nobody whose job it is to make sure you get what you are owed.
The law treats those two workers identically. Their outcomes are not identical.
Then the states counted
When I first read that study, the obvious question was how often this actually happens. The paper shows a gap in claim rates. It does not follow individual parents through their leave.
State agencies do, and their annual reports are public. So I went and read them. What is in there is more specific than I expected.
Massachusetts counted how many parents claimed both halves of their leave. In most states a birthing parent has two separate claims to file: a medical leave for childbirth recovery, and a bonding leave for time with the baby. Two claims, often two forms, sometimes two programs.
In its 2025 annual report, the Massachusetts Department of Family and Medical Leave reported that 69.09 percent of people who took approved medical leave to recover from childbirth also took an approved bonding leave. The year before, that figure was 74.10 percent.
Turn it around. Roughly three in ten Massachusetts parents recovered on paid leave and never claimed the bonding leave they had already earned. And the share missing it grew, in a year when the program's overall use went up 13 percent.
I want to be careful with that number, because it is a ceiling rather than a precise count. Some of those parents took bonding leave through an employer's own approved plan, which the state does not count. Some gave birth late in the year and filed their bonding claim in the next reporting period. Some genuinely chose not to take it. The honest version is that up to a third of parents are leaving the second half on the table, and the trend is moving the wrong way.
Washington measured what the second claim is worth. In the same reporting cycle, Washington's Employment Security Department found that customers who took medical pregnancy leave followed by bonding averaged 15.6 weeks of leave over a 12-month period. The average across all customers on the same measure was 9.9 weeks.
Filing both claims is worth nearly six additional weeks at home. Not a different law, not a different employer. The same person, filing one more form. That second claim is the first item in our list of seven ways to maximize your paid family leave, because nothing else on it moves as many weeks.
The paperwork itself is the barrier
The part of these reports that stayed with me is the denial data, because it does not describe people who were ineligible.
Of the roughly 36,000 Massachusetts applications denied in 2025, about 34 percent failed on documentation. Either the application was never completed, or the documents submitted did not meet the requirements. Washington's report lands in almost exactly the same place, at roughly 35 percent, once you count both missing paperwork and applications filed before the qualifying event.
Two states, two separate agencies, two different systems. Both find that about a third of denials are process failures rather than eligibility failures. These are people who qualified and lost the benefit anyway.
Massachusetts publishes one more figure that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Of the incomplete applications, 5,597 were people who started an application on the state website and never submitted it. Not denied. Not rejected. They opened the form, and they stopped.
Another 2,800 were denied for requesting more weeks than they were entitled to, which is not carelessness. It is not knowing your own number.
This is not a story about people being careless
I want to be direct about this, because the easy version of the story is that some people just do not fill out their paperwork. That is not what the data shows, and it is not what I have seen.
The people who miss out are not disorganized. They are working at places where the information does not circulate. They are told to check the portal when the portal does not mention the state program. They are guessing at whether short-term disability applies to childbirth, because nobody said. They are asking a manager who is also guessing.
And they are doing all of this while pregnant, or while caring for a newborn, which is not the season of life when anyone has surplus capacity to become an expert in insurance filing rules.
Five thousand people did not abandon a form because they did not care. They abandoned it because at that moment, in that week of their life, it asked for something they did not have.
The researchers frame this as an inequality problem, and I think that is right. The workers most likely to miss benefits are the ones who could least afford to.
What this actually costs
The scale here is easy to underestimate. In its 2025 fiscal year, California's Disability Insurance program paid out more than $11 billion, roughly five times what the state's better-known Paid Family Leave program paid over the same period. Pregnancy and childbirth alone accounted for about 166,000 paid disability claims, roughly 23 percent of every disability claim the state paid.
That last part is worth sitting with. One of the largest single uses of state disability insurance in the country is having a baby, and almost nobody thinks of disability insurance as parental leave. It gets filed under the wrong mental category, which is exactly why it is the claim people forget.
For an individual family, missing a filing window or never learning that disability covers childbirth recovery is measured in thousands of dollars. Missing the interaction between an employer policy and a state benefit, where you get both stacked instead of one offsetting the other, can be five figures on a single leave.
None of that arrives as a denial letter. There is no notice telling you what you left behind. The claim simply never gets filed, the weeks pass, and the family absorbs the difference without ever knowing there was a difference to absorb.
The part that is actually in your control
Here is why I find all of this encouraging rather than depressing.
If the gap were caused by the law treating people differently, an individual could not do much about it. But the gap is caused by information and process, and those are things you can get from somewhere other than your employer.
Concretely, these are the things a well-supported employee gets told, which you can go find on your own:
Does your state have a paid leave program, and are you eligible? This is not always obvious. Eligibility usually depends on your earnings history rather than your current employer, so people who recently changed jobs frequently assume wrongly that they do not qualify.
Do you have short-term disability, and did you enroll in time? This is the piece most people discover too late. It typically covers 6 to 8 weeks of recovery at around 60 percent of pay, and most plans require enrollment before pregnancy. If you are planning a family, this is the highest-value box in your benefits portal.
Are there two claims to file, not one? For birthing parents there usually are. Washington's numbers say the second one is worth about seven more weeks. Massachusetts says almost a third of parents never file it.
How does your employer's policy interact with the state benefit? Stacked means they pay on top. Offset means they only cover the difference. Same paragraph in a handbook, wildly different totals. Ask in writing.
What are the filing windows? Every program has one. Some states permanently cut off retroactive pay for late filers, and one in nine Washington denials was someone who filed too early rather than too late. These deadlines land earlier than most people expect.
If you have a partner, how should you sequence? Two parents home simultaneously feels natural and is sometimes right. Sequencing usually buys the family more total weeks of coverage. That is arithmetic, and it is worth doing before anyone files anything.
Nobody at your job is paid to walk you through that list. At some companies, someone does anyway. At most, nobody does.
Why we built this
My husband is a CPA and I am a nurse practitioner. When we started planning our own leave, we assumed our professional backgrounds would make it straightforward.
It took three weekends. Not because the rules are unknowable, but because they are scattered across a state agency site, an insurance plan document, an employee handbook, and a federal statute, none of which reference each other. We had the skills to work it out and it still cost us most of a month of evenings.
That is when it became obvious that the difference between families who get everything they are owed and families who do not is mostly a difference in access to someone who has assembled the picture. So we assembled it.
The free check takes about 60 seconds and tells you which programs you are likely eligible for. It does not require you to know any of the vocabulary in advance, which is the entire point.
You should not need a well-staffed HR department to receive what the law already says is yours.
Research cited: Bana, Bedard, Rossin-Slater, and Stearns, Unequal Use of Social Insurance Benefits: The Role of Employers, NBER Working Paper 25163, published in the Journal of Econometrics (2022). The 57 percent figure refers to California DI and PFL claim rates and reflects a one standard deviation increase in the employer's earnings premium.
State program figures come from agency annual reports: the Massachusetts Department of Family and Medical Leave FY2025 Annual Report, the Washington Employment Security Department FY2025 paid leave report, and California EDD Program Statistics. Fiscal years differ by state. None of these agencies or researchers have any connection to Parental Leave Pro.
Related state guides
This post refers to these states. Each guide has the current 2026 rules, rates, and filing deadlines:
If you want the plain explanation of what bonding leave is and why it's a separate claim, I wrote that up here: Bonding Leave, Explained.
And if you'd rather have the short version, five sourced numbers and what each one should change about your plan: 5 paid family leave statistics to know before week 30.