By Susan Schoenfeld, JD
Senior Legal Editor

How do you calculate FMLA hours for employees such as fire personnel who work a 24-hour on-shift and a 48-hour off-shift and for police officers who work a 10-hour or 12-hour shift?

An eligible employee’s Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave entitlement is limited to a total of 12 workweeks of leave during any 12-month period. FMLA-eligible employees are also entitled to 26 workweeks of leave in a single 12-month period to care for a covered family member who is recovering from a serious illness or injury sustained during active military duty.

A “week” is determined by an employee’s regular workweek. For example, an employee who works Monday through Friday has a 5-day workweek. An employee, who works Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, has a 3-day workweek.

Where leave is taken on an intermittent or reduced leave basis, it is important to ascertain the number of “days” of leave an employee may take. An employee who has a 5-day workweek is entitled to 60 days’ leave in a 12-month period: 5 days × 12 weeks. An employee who works a 3-day workweek is entitled to only 36 days’ leave in a 12-month period: 3 days × 12 weeks.

It is also important to be able to calculate how many “hours” of leave an employee on intermittent or reduced leave is entitled to. This calculation is based on an employee’s regular workweek.

For example, an employee who regularly works a 5-day week and 8 hours a day is entitled to 480 hours of leave: (5 days × 12 weeks) × 8 hours. Similarly, an employee who works a 3-day week and 8 hours each day is entitled to 288 hours of leave: (3 days × 12 weeks) × 8 hours.

For the fire personnel in your inquiry, one way to calculate FMLA leave hours is to add the hours worked over the 3-week period (72 the first week, 48 the second, 48 the third) before the pattern repeats. The total for the 3 weeks is 168. By dividing the total hours by 3, you get an average of 56 hours per week (56 hours x 12 weeks = 672 hours of leave). For the police officers who work a 10- or 12-hour shift, the same method outlined above may be used unless the hours vary significantly from week to week.

The FMLA rules provide an option for employers for variable schedules:

If an employee’s schedule varies from week to week to such an extent that an employer is unable to determine with any certainty how many hours the employee would otherwise have worked (but for the taking of FMLA leave), a weekly average of the hours scheduled over the 12 months before the beginning of the leave period (including any hours for which the employee took leave of any type) would be used for calculating the employee’s leave entitlement (29 CFR 825.205).