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Welcome to the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) Website
on the revisions to the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) Regulations.
The revised Final
Regulations (PDF) respond to over 4,600 public comments received in
response to the Department’s February 2008 Notice
of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) (PDF) , which proposed changes to the
current FMLA regulations. The NPRM was developed in response to several
U.S. Supreme Court and lower court cases invalidating portions of the current
regulations, the passage of amendments to the FMLA included as Section 585(a)
of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal
Year 2008 (Public Law 110-181), and a comprehensive review of the Department’s
fifteen years of experience administering the FMLA, including two previous
Department of Labor studies of the FMLA (in 1996 and 2001) and over 15,000
public comments received in response to a Request
for Information (RFI) (PDF) published in the Federal Register on December
1, 2006, and summarized in the Department’s June 2007 Report on the RFI (PDF).
The Final
Regulations (PDF) implement two important new military family leave
entitlements for eligible specified family members:
(1) Up to 12 weeks of leave for certain qualifying exigencies arising
out of a covered military member's active duty status, or notification of
an impending call or order to active duty status, in support of a contingency
operation, and
(2) Up to 26 weeks of leave in a single 12-month period to care for a
covered servicemember recovering from a serious injury or illness incurred
in the line of duty on active duty. Eligible employees are entitled
to a combined total of up to 26 weeks of all types of FMLA leave during
the single 12-month period.
The Final Regulations
(PDF) became effective on January 16, 2009.
Additional information on the Final Regulations:
Additional information on the military family leave amendments to
the FMLA:
Additional information on the FMLA:
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