Baby is here. How much leave do parents take?

Family leave policies have been debated in the U.S. for decades. Of the 38 member countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is the only one that lacks a national paid leave policy. Parents who welcome a child may instead use a combination of federal unpaid leave, disability insurance, state paid leave, and employer-sponsored benefits that provide some amount of job protection or wage replacement. But in this debate, important context is missing: How much leave do U.S. parents take?

“One of the things that struck me … is how little we really know about how much time people take and how they manage this time when a kid is born. It turns out to be really hard to measure,” former Institute visiting scholar Brenden Timpe said.

Challenge accepted. Timpe and University of Nebraska colleagues Rebecca Jack and Daniel Tannenbaum set out to put together a dataset that includes approximately 900,000 mothers and 750,000 fathers who welcomed a child between 2005 and 2019, capturing around 1 in 70 U.S. births. They then use responses to the American Community Survey to identify parents who are employed but on leave. With this data, the economists are able to provide a comprehensive picture on the length and timing of parental leave-taking, the subject of a new Institute working paper.

While 90 percent of U.S. workers had access to job-protected, unpaid leave by 2019, the share of parents who took leave was lower, Timpe and his colleagues find. New parents work a lot. Fathers take less than one week of leave, on average, in the month before and six months after baby arrives. Mothers take more, around 7.2 weeks, but this is less than the amount benefits allow. About 89 percent of those who were employed before birth were back at work within five months.

“There’s a lot of good reasons to think that parental leave matters in a wide variety of areas,” Timpe said. Research shows that how parents spend time in the window after childbirth matters for both maternal health outcomes and for children’s long-term development. When it comes to the workplace, parents’ labor-market activity after childbirth may affect career advancement as well as the gender earnings gap.

The length of parental leave may contribute to these important outcomes. But before we can analyze the potential for cause and effect, we need a better understanding of the current landscape of leave-taking. “It’s something we should know if we’re going to make informed policy,” Timpe said.

How much leave are parents allowed?

Family leave in America is a patchwork of policies. While the country lacks a national paid family leave policy, it does have the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave after birth, adoption, or new foster care placement (in addition to other qualifying reasons). The FMLA does provide job protection—workers cannot lose their job for going on leave—but it does not provide any financial assistance during the absence from work.

Paid leave is rarer. Starting with California in 2004, 13 states plus Washington, D.C., offer paid leave policies. The most generous of these, in Oregon, offers 12 weeks of job-protected leave that pays 100 percent of weekly wages up to a maximum of $1,636 a week. Private employers may also offer paid family leave to employees. For mothers, private short-term disability insurance may provide financial assistance, usually one-half to two-thirds of usual wages, for six to eight weeks.

Figure 1 summarizes the share of workers with access to these different types of paid and unpaid leave policies between 1997 and 2023. Access to unpaid family leave increased from 76 percent to 89 percent in this span, while state paid leave increased from zero to 30 percent. Access to paid leave is lower overall, and it varies with employee education and the nature of employment: 71 percent of college-educated employees and 67 percent of salaried employees have access, but only 40 percent of noncollege-educated and 44 percent of hourly employees do.

A dataset to identify parents and their leave

Having access to a benefit does not mean a worker uses that benefit, however. To assess how much leave parents actually take, Timpe and his co-authors link birth records from 2005 to 2019 to the American Community Survey, which asks respondents, “Last week, did you do any work for pay, even for as little as one hour?” If respondents answer no, they are asked if they were temporarily absent from a job or business due to vacation, illness, maternity leave, or another reason. Together, these questions let the economists identify parents who were employed prior to the birth of a child and whether the parents took leave in the weeks before or after birth.

By counting as “on leave” only individuals who did zero work for pay in the previous work week, the economists are applying a strict definition that may not always align with how the individual would describe their work status. However, two pieces of data suggest they are not leaving out large numbers of parents who are simply answering email for a couple hours a week but otherwise are on leave. First, among parents whom the economists classify as “at work” in the few weeks after birth, 99 percent report they are working in person, not remotely. Second, the economists look at the time diaries for new parents, courtesy of the American Time Use Survey. Those detailed accounts of how respondents spend their day show that among parents who said they were absent from work, more than three-quarters reported no time on paid work activities.

How much leave do parents take?

The new dataset allows Jack, Tannenbaum, and Timpe to track how much leave parents take in the six months before and the year following their child’s birth. The results are captured in Figure 2.

Around 70 percent of mothers and 93 percent of fathers are employed in the six months prior to the arrival of a child, so both mothers and fathers are actively involved in the labor market at high rates. And large majorities remain in the labor force after birth as well: Fathers’ employment remains at 93 percent for the 18 months the economists look at, while mothers’ employment falls 6 percentage points.

Figure 2 shows that mothers’ presence at work starts to decline in the weeks before birth and then drops sharply when baby arrives. Nearly three-quarters of mothers take at least one week of leave, and the average length of leave for moms is 7.2 weeks.

And yet, around 25 percent of mothers continue to work in the two weeks immediately after birth. Among mothers who were employed prior to childbirth, more than half had returned by week 10, and 94 percent were back by week 19. For comparison, mothers in Canada took an average of 25 weeks of leave in 2024.

In contrast, fathers’ work activity responds much less to the birth of a child. In the three weeks after birth, about 6 percent of fathers are absent from work. Dads’ average length of leave is 0.6 weeks (three days).

Although the share of workers covered by paid and unpaid leave has increased since 2005, as Figure 1 shows, the length of leave that parents actually take has not increased over time. Just the opposite. While the share of moms employed before birth has ticked up (except for the period right after the Great Recession), the amount of leave has edged down by about three days.

Who takes parental leave?

Interestingly, there is little difference in the length of leave-taking among parents of different races or ethnicities or with different levels of education. What does differ is the timing of that leave: Mothers without a college education take more leave in the month prior to and month after birth. Mothers with college degrees take more leave in months two to five after birth. This might be due to the nature of the tasks they perform at their jobs. The economists find that mothers with physically demanding jobs tend to take leave immediately prior to and after birth. Mothers with decision-making or leadership roles tend to take leave later on.

What does make a difference in the amount of leave mothers take is whether or not they live in a state with a paid family leave policy. In states without paid family leave, moms take an average of 6.9 weeks. In states with paid leave, the average is 9.4 weeks—35 percent more.

The evidence suggests factors besides the presence of a state paid leave policy matter too. For one, mothers in states with paid leave policies appear to take shorter leaves than their benefits allow. The economists highlight California as an example, where the state’s paid family leave plus the state’s short-term disability program would allow for 16 weeks of paid leave. And yet, average leave for moms in California is just over half that long.

In addition, there is variation in average leave across states that lack a paid family leave policy (Figure 3). South Dakota is shortest, at 4.2 weeks, and Pennsylvania is longest, at 6.9 weeks.

The evolving dynamics of parental leave

For Timpe, one of the more surprising findings from the analysis is how the length of benefits is headed up while the length of actual leave-taking appears headed down. “After digging into this, we’ve come to the conclusion that the amount of work that moms are doing around childbirth is going up,” Timpe said. “I think an unanswered question is to what extent that’s the way people want to balance a baby and career, and what extent this is by necessity—people don’t have access to benefits, and this is just what they have to do.”

Other countries suggest a different equilibrium is possible. “In Europe, Canada, and other industrialized countries, long-standing and virtually universal parental leave policies are the norm,” the economists write. “Demand for these policies also tends to be high, as mothers’ time off after childbirth tends to extend at least as long as paid parental leave benefits last.” The American data suggest policy is not the only factor at play; the length of parental leave is the outcome of a complex personal formula in which weeks of pay is just one variable. Understanding the parental leave landscape can help both policymakers and parents make choices that promote work and family lives.