Who is considered a covered family member under the bereavement leave law?

Employees with 30 days of service may take up to five days of job-protected bereavement leave upon the death of a spouse, child, parent, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, domestic partner or parent-in-law. The new law uses the definitions of those terms from the California Family Rights Act (CFRA) regulations.

Complex family relationships can make it quite a challenge to figure out exactly for whom an employee may legally take bereavement leave.

For example, a spouse is someone to whom your employee is currently married. It does not include a former spouse.

A domestic partner is not merely an individual with whom your employee lives; the couple must be registered as a domestic partnership with the California Secretary of State. California does not recognize common-law marriages, even for couples who have lived together for many years.

Therefore, an employee would not be entitled to bereavement leave for the father of their child if they were neither married nor registered as domestic partners.

As another example, an employee may use bereavement leave for current parents-in-law, stepchildren or stepparents, as well as the parents and children of their current registered domestic partner.

An employee’s divorce or dissolution of a registered domestic partnership would, by law, end the other linked relationships, so an employee would not be entitled to use bereavement leave for their former father-in-law.

Similarly, if your employee is widowed, they would not be entitled to use bereavement leave for the individuals whom they still may consider to be their in-laws and stepchildren. This is because they are not legally related to those individuals after the death of their spouse or domestic partner.

Note that if your employee stood in loco parentis to a child while that child was growing up, protected bereavement leave could apply despite the end of a legal relationship as a stepchild. In loco parentis means a person who stands in place of a parent by having day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support a child even without a biological or legal relationship.

It’s important to note that although the CFRA was expanded recently to allow a leave of up to 12 weeks to care for a designated person (any individual “related by blood or whose association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship”) with a serious health condition, the bereavement leave law does not provide employees time off after the death of a designated person.

Given the many complex family relationships that can arise, an employer certainly could choose to extend bereavement leave beyond what is required by law.

Seek legal counsel if you wish to extend your bereavement policy beyond the relationships covered by the new law.

Read more about Bereavement Leave in the HR Library.