Protected Leave

Protected Leave: Qualifications & Eligibility

You must meet the following requirements to qualify for protected leave:

If you take time intermittently or work a reduced work schedule, you must be able to perform the essential functions of your job while you are at work. If you are unable to perform your job responsibilities while at work, you may be required to take continuous leave.

Leave Entitlement

With some exceptions, employees are entitled to 12 weeks within a one-year period.  That exhausts the FMLA leave entitlement except for military caregivers leave, which can extend to 26 weeks in one leave year.  Under OFLA, women taking any pregnancy disability leave are allowed an additional 12 weeks for any OFLA purpose. Either parent who has taken a full 12 weeks of parental leave (e.g., to care for a newborn, newly adopted child or newly placed foster child) are also entitled to take up to an additional 12 weeks leave to care for a child with a non-serious health condition requiring home care.

Eligible Reasons Under FMLA

Although there are a few exceptions, FMLA generally provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year for the following purposes:

Eligible Reasons Under OFLA

Beginning July 1, 2024, OFLA provides protected time off to eligible employees for the following reasons:

Note: that for purposes of sick child leave, the child must be either under the age of 18 or an adult dependent child substantially limited by a physical or mental impairment.

Bereavement Leave

Employees may take leave to attend a funeral (or alternative ceremony), to make arrangements necessitated by the death of a family member, or simply to grieve the death of a family member.

Oregon Family Leave Act (OFLA) provides up to two weeks of leave with job and benefit protections, to attend the funeral or alternative to a funeral of a family member, to make arrangements necessitated by the death of a family member, or to grieve the death of a family member. Bereavement leave must be completed within 60 days from the date knowledge or death.

Military Leave

Exigency Leave

Exigency leave allows eligible employees to take up to 12 work weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a 12-month period for a “qualifying exigency” arising out of the foreign deployment of the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent. FMLA leave for this purpose is called qualifying exigency leave.

Military Caregiver Leave

Military caregiver leave allows an eligible employee who is the spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin of a covered service member with a serious injury or illness to take up to a total of 26 workweeks of unpaid leave during a “single 12-month period” to provide care for the service member.

Oregon Military Family Leave Act (OMFLA)

The Oregon Military Family Leave Act (OMFLA) allows an employee to take up to 14 days of leave per deployment to spend time with a spouse or same-gender domestic partner who is in the military and has been notified of an impending call or order to active duty or who has been deployed during a period of military conflict. 

Safe Leave

Employees who are victims of domestic violence, harassment, sexual assault, stalking or bias, or whose minor child or dependent is a victim, are eligible for leave as a reasonable safety accommodation for reasons such as the following: