Intermittent FMLA leave is a flexible way of allowing leave to the employees. FMLA stands for Family and Medical Leave Act. The act allows the employees to take leave to take care of their seriously ill loved ones and also the well-being of themselves. There are three types of FMLA leave: continuous FMLA leave, intermittent FMLA leave, and reduced schedule FMLA leave. An employee can opt for any type of leave as per his requirement. Amongst the three, intermittent FMLA leave is the most flexible one and is often opted by employees. The intermittent leave involves breaking down of days or hours into increments to take care of the ill family member or oneself.
Since in intermittent leave, the leave is broken into days or hours, it becomes burdensome to keep a record of each and every employee. It is cumbersome to maintain the records of every leave accurately and also keep knowing the fact that the number of days or hours of leave shall not be the same for each employee. Therefore, it becomes a problem while calculating the intermittent FMLA time.
An employee is allowed for a 12-week FMLA leave. For computing intermittent leave, the period is mostly divided into hours. Like if an employee works for 40 hours every week, then his/her intermittent leave period shall be 40×12=480 hours. Therefore, the employee is eligible for 480 hours of intermittent leave. But, the computation is always not this simple. Also, the employee’s last year’s performance is considered to compute the leave period allowed.
- Regular Office Hours: If an employee works during regular office hours and does no overtime and was consistent last year, then his/her standard workweek of last year shall be taken into consideration. Like if he works consistently for 40 hours every week, then his/her leave shall be for 480 hours.
- Overtime Hours: If an employee has consistently worked overtime last year, then the overtime hours shall also be included in regular hours. Like an employee works for 50 hours every week this leave period shall be 50×12=600 hours.
- Different Schedule Every Week: If an employee has worked for different hours every week in the past year, then an average shall be taken to compute the FMLA leave and while computing the average every PTO, vacation or leave is needed to be considered.
- Changed Schedule: If an employee changes the schedule without discovering the need for FMLA leave, then the new schedule shall be used to compute the leave period and not the old one.
Before computing the leave period, there are mostly two requirements that must be kept in mind. First, the leave must be in the shortest leave period allowed like if the leave taken is for half-day, then FMLA leave cannot be calculated in amounts longer than that, such as a full day. Secondly, it cannot be longer than one hour increment.
There also exists one exception to the above computations. Employees who cannot take partial days off from work are allowed to take the entire day or shift as FMLA leave.
