Paid Maternity Leave: 180 Companies Who Offer The Best Paid Leave
All About Paid Maternity Leave
As of 2021, about 55% of employers in the United States offer paid maternity leave. But not all maternity leave policies are created equally.
Unlike almost every other industrialized nation in the world, there is no federal requirement that standardizes paid maternity leave in the United States. While there is a federal law mandating maternity leave, a vast number of women in the United States do not enjoy access to any paid job protection after the birth of a new baby.
Fairygodboss works to make maternity leave policies transparent with our parental leave database. There, you can see crowd-sourced information at a variety of companies, and can search by company and industry.
About the Family Medical Leave Act
There is, however, a federal requirement under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), that many women without access to paid maternity leave use to at least take unpaid time off from work and in order to be able to return to their jobs after childbirth. FMLA protects a worker’s job for up to 12 weeks during any 12 month period, if they meet certain eligibility criteria (e.g. they have worked for an employer for at least one year, clocking a minimum of 1,250 hours and the employer has at least 50 employees within 75 miles of her physical worksite).
Those who are fortunate to qualify for more than FMLA do so because they benefit from their employer’s benefit policies. Private companies and employers committed to diversity will offer maternity leave policies, paternity leave policies and short-term disability policies for their employees, in addition to traditional benefits like healthcare insurance and vacation benefits. In the past few years, in particular, there has been tremendous movement on the part of private employers to fill the gap and provide payment to employees during their parental leave.
Companies and Maternity Leave Policies
Historically, it’s been hard for expecting mothers to ask their employer about their maternity leave policies for fear of being stigmatized or judged as less committed. Many women fear being “mommy tracked” at work — coming back to a demotion or being taken off a leadership track. As a result, it’s been difficult for women to find out what their employers’ leave policies are. From its founding, Fairygodboss has crowdsourced a maternity leave database of over 1,500 employers in the U.S. and sorted their maternity and paternity leave policies by industry and length.
Certain patterns emerge among the companies that offer these very high levels of paid leave. First, they are largely for-profit institutions (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, change.org and the United Nations being a few of the exceptions), and they are organizations with professional workforces who need to see a commitment to diversity to be retained. After all, upwards of 80% of professional employees say they consider an employer's commitment to diversity in making job search decisions.
One thing to note is that while paid leave policies may exist for professional staff at these companies, certain employers choose to offer different benefits to contractual, part-time, hourly workers or other classifications of employees. At law firms, for example, attorneys may be eligible for paid maternity leave while administrative, operational and paralegal staff may have access to a lower level of benefit.
Another thing to note is that many of these companies offer different levels of paternity leave to their employees, or make a designation regarding who is the “primary caretaker,” which means that one person of a presumed two-person household may be entitled to a longer leave if they are the primary caretaker for the child. It’s a gender-neutral term that some employers have chosen to set their parental policy around, rather than pick a policy for a mother or father of a child.
Finally, just as a few employers have chosen to give their employees “unlimited” paid time off (or PTO), some also offer unlimited paid family leave. This leaves the decision as to time off for maternity or paternity leave with the individual employee and their manager. There is obviously no obligation to take any certain period of maternity leave, so some employees may come back within a much shorter time than the full potential allotment they are entitled to.
The Top 180 Employers for Paid Maternity Leave
Each of the employers in the below list offer at least 16 weeks of paid maternity leave. If your company is missing from the list, please submit an anonymous tip to our database.