5 days ago
4 Large Companies Top List For Best Paid Leave Policies In 2025 Index
The 2025 Leading on Leave Report highlights paid leave trends among large companies, including ... More expanding employee eligibility, lowering barriers to use, and covering a wider range of caregiving needs.
Increasing employee demand for paid leave, particularly among young workers, was among the top employee benefits trends of 2024. Gen Z workers ranked paid leave as their top employee benefits priority in a 2024 MetLife survey. When asked about critical factors in selecting a job, 71% of Gen Z workers cited paid time off, according to a 2024 Economist Impact report.
So which large companies have been most responsive to these shifting employee priorities?
The National Partnership for Women & Families released its 2025 Leading on Leave Report today. The report recognizes companies with comprehensive paid leave policies and highlights key trends in paid leave innovation.
The four large companies recognized as NPWF 2025 Leaders on Leave, in alphabetical order, include:
This list was based on data gathered between June and October of 2024, in response to NPWF's invitation to private sector companies to apply to the Leading on Leave Index.
NPWF scored each of the 20 applicants' paid leave benefits based on alignment with best practices. The four companies recognized as leaders achieved top scores for their paid leave policies among the applicants with an annual revenue of $1 billion or more.
'Despite growing demand, 73% of U.S. workers still lack access to paid leave,' said Jesse Matton, Director of Corporate Social Impact Policies at NPWF, via email. 'With the Leading on Leave report, we're spotlighting companies that are turning policy into action—and showing that transparency and innovation are critical to both workforce equity and long-term business resilience.'
In addition to recognizing corporate leaders on paid leave, NPWF aggregated data from the Leading on Leave Index to identify key trends in paid parental, family, and medical leave benefits. Three trends stood out as effective innovations among large companies to better meet employees' caregiving needs.
Large companies are expanding eligibility along several key dimensions, including offering paid leave benefits to both full-time and part-time employees. Responsive companies are making paid leave available to employees on their first day of work, without any length of service requirement. Large companies are also increasingly meeting the best practice of offering paid parental leave to both primary and secondary caregivers.
Some large companies are adopting more flexible family definitions for paid family and sick leave to reflect shifts in modern family structures. While typical policies cover caregiving for children, spouses and parents, innovative companies are also covering leave for extended family members, such as siblings, grandparents, grandchildren and even some nonfamilial relationships.
Many large companies are responding to the gap between paid leave eligibility and actual use by ensuring full salary coverage during leave periods, allowing intermittent leave, and easing employee notice and documentation requirements. Large companies are also abandoning any requirement that employees find another worker to cover for them before taking leave.
Some large companies are experimenting with return-to-work policies that ease employees' transition back to the workplace after extended leave periods. Best practices include allowing gradual reentry and flexible work arrangements.
Large companies tend to have more segmented paid leave policies than small and medium sized companies. Among large companies, there is a trend toward expanding categories of paid leave for various employee needs, including bereavement, pregnancy loss, abortion travel, and safe leave for sexual, domestic or other violence-related exigencies.
Leaders are recognizing that competitive paid leave benefits are becoming a business imperative. But the lack of any 'standard' paid leave package, along with a lack of benefits transparency, has made it challenging for even well intentioned companies to achieve this goal.
Companies have a growing number of resources available to help design competitive work-family benefits. But it remains challenging for companies to accurately benchmark their full range of paid leave policies against industry competitors.
NPWF's new Leading on Leave Index helps companies meet employee demand by allowing business leaders to accurately assess and improve their paid leave benefits. NPWF is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with over 50 years of experience on paid leave policy research, analysis and legislative advocacy.
The Leading on Leave initiative is designed to maximize corporate participation by eliminating any downside risk. Companies voluntarily submit a free application by providing details on their workforce demographics and paid leave policies.
Unlike many public ranking systems, NPWF's Index keeps all individual company data private, unless a company consents to public disclosure. NPWF does not disclose the names or scores of companies that participate and do not achieve Index recognition.
Confidentiality empowers companies to provide complete data without concerns about poor ratings that may impact their reputation. The objective is to enable companies to receive valuable feedback, while allowing NPWF to analyze more complete data on industry trends.
Participating employers receive individualized feedback on how their paid leave policies align with best practices, tailored recommendations for improvement, and benchmark data among industry comparators. As Matton explains, the Index fills the communication and transparency gap by 'offering a roadmap for employers to lead on leave and drive better business outcomes.'
