Overview
New Jersey Paid Family Leave Insurance (NJFLI) provides eligible employees with partial wage replacement and job protection to bond with a new child, care for a family member with a serious health condition, or take leave related to domestic or sexual violence, either as a victim/survivor handling non-medical matters or as someone caring for a family member who is the victim.
For detailed legislative requirements, see our Legislative Guidance.
Policy Status Decisions
This policy is administered by the state unless the employer has an approved plan to administer on their own.
💡 Best Practice: Follow the state's decision so the policy status matches the state's determination for benefits.
How to Use
Throughout this guidance, look for these labels to quickly identify what actions may be needed:
✅ Automatic: System handles this automatically, no action needed
📝 Configuration Note: How the policy is set up in the platform
💡 Best Practice: AbsenceSoft recommendation for optimal management
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: User must complete this action or track elsewhere
How AbsenceSoft Manages the Law
AbsenceSoft manages this law through 1 policy:
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Policy Name - New Jersey Paid Family Leave Insurance
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Policy Code - NJ-FTD
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Benefit Type - Paid Leave and Job Protection
Administration Options
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State Plan (default)- Administered through the state's Division of Temporary Disability Insurance/Family Leave Insurance program
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Private Plans (fully or self-insured) - Requires custom policies.
💡 Best Practice: Employers with a private plan should customize the existing policy to meet their state approved requirements and change the policy type to Company to show the policy is owned by the employer.
Employer Coverage Requirements
Refer to Legislative guidance for details.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Excluded employers are not covered under the law and may need to disable the policy in the platform to keep it from rendering. Discuss decisions with legal counsel for best approach.
Employee Eligibility
This policy is a state paid leave program that may have eligibility criteria tied to wages/earnings that are not available in the platform. Employers should follow the state's determination for the wage replacement policy.
💡 Best Practice: Follow the state's decision so the policy status matches the state's determination for eligibility.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Overrides in eligibility may be required if the state determines the employee has not met the eligibility requirements necessary for paid benefits.
Waivers or Reclassification
Refer to Legislative guidance for details.
💡 Best Practice: Follow the state's decision so the policy status matches the state's determination for eligibility.
Eligibility Exceptions
Excluded Employees
Refer to Legislative guidance for details.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Manually override eligibility from pass to fail for excluded employees.
Leave Entitlements and Duration
Entitlement Overview
All NJ-FTD absence reasons share a single combined entitlement of 12 work weeks per 12-month rolling forward period.
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Adoption/Foster Care
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Bonding
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Care of Child during Public Health Emergency
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Domestic Violence
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Employee Caring for Individual Isolated/Quarantined
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Family Health Condition
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Pregnancy/Maternity
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Safe Leave
Entitlement Rules
✅ Automatic: AbsenceSoft automatically tracks leave against the shared 12-week pool across all active absence reasons within this policy.
📝 Configuration Note: Maximum leave is 12 work weeks (84 days) continuous or 8 work weeks (56 days) intermittent per 12-month rolling forward period, shared across all absence reasons.
📝 Configuration Note: Pregnancy/Maternity is configured as a convenience reason so employers can manage a single case where pregnancy disability transitions directly into FLI bonding; a policy event starts the FLI policy based on the Bonding Start Date.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Care of Child during Public Health Emergency and Employee Caring for Individual Isolated/Quarantined are only valid when the state has declared a public health emergency or state of emergency. AbsenceSoft's policy does not automatically confirm the declaration; leave managers should verify and manually deny if no emergency has been declared.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Bonding, Adoption/Foster Care, and Pregnancy/Maternity each carry policy events tied to the Delivery Date, Adoption Date, or Bonding Start Date to enforce the 12-month leave window. Case managers will need to update case information to reflect the correct bonding start, delivery, or adoption date so these policy events calculate accurately.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Domestic Violence and Safe Leave case periods are configured to end 12 months from the case start date. AbsenceSoft does not currently capture the incident date to automatically end the policy period from that date; leave managers should track and manually adjust the end date based on the actual incident date.
How Leave Can Be Taken
Refer to Legislative guidance for details.
Intermittent Leave Requirements
📝 Configuration Note: AbsenceSoft's policy is configured in Work Weeks to support Payroll Calculations tracking; New Jersey pays FLI benefits in calendar-day/calendar-week terms, so this approximates the statutory calendar-based accounting.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: AbsenceSoft's policy does not distinguish between the 84-day (12-week) continuous maximum and the 56-day (8-week) intermittent maximum, and the platform's intermittent-restriction feature cannot currently enforce the state's required one-day minimum increment. Leave managers should track intermittent usage against the 56-day cap manually and deny or override once the cap is reached.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Intermittent bonding leave requires agreement between the employee and employer under the law. AbsenceSoft does not enforce this agreement requirement; leave managers should confirm and track this agreement outside the platform.
Interaction with other Policies
Refer to Legislative guidance for details.
📝 Configuration Note: NJ-FTD is not concurrent with New Jersey Temporary Disability Insurance (NJ-STD). An employee may not receive benefits under both policies at the same time.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Pregnancy/Maternity absence reason is configured on this policy to account for bonding immediately following pregnancy. Leave managers may have to deny out this policy if it does not apply to the situation.
Required Paperwork/Communication
📝 Configuration Note: AbsenceSoft provides core paperwork for NJ-FTD through the NJ Family Leave Insurance (NJFLI) paperwork/attachment. Paperwork is configured to be sent as part of the Employee Eligibility packet. Employers with private plans may have different requirements causing the need for a custom paperwork attachment be created with employer specific details.
NJ-FTD certification forms are not available in the platform and are made available to the employee through the Division of Temporary Disability Insurance/Family Leave Insurance program’s online portal.❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Updates to existing paperwork items can occur. When updates happen, they are automatically applied to paperwork unless the client has customized. Clients with customizations on the relevant paperwork will need to review to determine how to adopt the new paperwork and apply any new customizations to the updated paperwork manually.
Managing In-Flight Cases
Review any open NJ-FTD case, across all absence reasons, that was active before July 17, 2026 (the effective date of the job protection amendment) or before the policy's v2 migration release.
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Identify open NJ-FTD cases with a case start date before July 17, 2026.
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Confirm the case reflects the corrected 12-month rolling forward measurement period, anchored to the date the employee first established the claim, rather than any prior Employer Default setting.
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Manually update the case, or the policy configuration applied to the case, so job protection and the current entitlement configuration apply going forward.
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Document the review in the case notes.
💡 Best Practice: Document in the case notes that the policy was reviewed and updated to reflect the July 17, 2026 job protection amendment and the corrected measurement period, including the date of review. Employers may also decide to send an updated communication notifying their employees of new protections outside of the AbsenceSoft offerings.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: Leave managers should track which in-flight cases have been reviewed and updated to ensure no case is missed during the transition.
Payroll Calculations
New Jersey does not currently have a Base Wage Calculation Method built into Payroll Calculations.
❌ Manual Action or Tracking Required: New Jersey determines how many "base weeks" fall within a quarter using a methodology that changes from quarter to quarter, and the state does not publish that determination until after the fact. Because there is no published, stable formula to build against, this policy cannot use a standard AbsenceSoft-maintained base wage method.
To use this policy with Payroll Calculations, it must be customized. Contact AbsenceSoft support for a recommendation on configuring a custom base wage formula that closely approximates New Jersey's methodology. The recommended approximation uses a fixed 13 weeks per quarter, rather than New Jersey's rotating, retroactively-determined base week count.
Need Help?
For questions about policy configuration or case management, contact your AbsenceSoft support team or consult the Legislative Guidance for compliance details.