What Employers Need to know ! NYS DBL and NYS PFL

As a working New Yorker, you generally enjoy a pretty wide range of benefits—from health insurance to (sometimes) paid vacation days. As we look at how Paid Family Leave will add to and enhance these benefits, we need to take a closer look at another existing benefit extended to most employees in New York to fully understand it: Statutory short-term Disability Benefits, or DBL.
What is DBL? Provided for by Article 9 of the Worker s Compensation Law, DBL provides paid time off for employees who injured themselves off the job or have a serious illness that requires a sustained period of time away from work. For a maximum of 26 weeks, eligible employees can receive cash benefits of 50% of their average weekly wage, up to the current maximum benefit allowed ($170/week).

How PFL and DBL Relate

When Paid Family Leave goes into effect on January 1, 2018, it will be implemented as a rider into
existing DBL policies, so any employer covered by DBL will be required to provide PFL to their eligible employees. This also means that both DBL and PFL must be from the same insurance carrier. Employers who are exempt from DBL, such as municipalities can choose to provide stand-alone Paid Family Leave. Sole proprietors and partners in LLCs/LLPs can get voluntary Paid Family Leave coverage similar to how they obtained their voluntary DBL coverage. Therefore, in today’s post we will highlight some of the essential features, commonalities, and differences
between the two. So, how do they compare? The key differentiator between PFL and DBL is that DBL is taken for YOUR OWN injury or illness, where Paid Family Leave is taken to care for someone else, for example, a member of your immediate family like a child or parent, or bonding with a newborn after delivery.

* The above is a piece from an article put together by the DBL Center and MCM Agency.