The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides eligible employees up to twelve (12) weeks of job-protected leave in a calendar year for specified family and medical reasons. Employees who have been employed by the City of Columbus for at least 12 months and who have worked at least 1,250 hours during the previous 12 months are eligible to request FMLA for the reasons listed below:

  • the birth of a child and to care for the newborn child within one year of birth;
  • the placement of a child with the employee for adoption or foster care and to care for the child within one year of placement;
  • a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform their essential job functions;
  • to care for the employee’s spouse, child, or parent who has a serious health condition;
  • any qualifying exigency arising from the fact that the employee’s spouse, son, daughter, or parent is a covered military member on “covered active duty” or
  • Twenty–six (26) work weeks of leave in a single 12-month period to care for a covered service member with a serious injury or illness if the eligible employee is the service member’s spouse, son, daughter, parent, or next of kin.

Requesting FMLA

Employees wanting to request FMLA based on one of the criteria listed above need to:

  1. Notify your supervisor that you may need FMLA and obtain an FMLA certification form for the type of leave you need – self or family. Employees can also download a copy of the FMLA certification for Employee here or Family Member here.
  2. Medical certification must be completed by the treating medical provider and submitted to Human Resources within 15 calendar days of your initial request for FMLA.

The Medical Certification will need to be completed and submitted before FMLA leaves can be approved.

FMLA will run concurrently (at the same time) as other types of employee paid leave. Any time off, paid or not, may be designated as FMLA. Any family medical leave time taken that does not include vacation, sick time, personal time, use of compensatory time, or use of short-term disability time is without pay. If vacation, sick time, personal time, or comp time is available, it must be used before taking leave as unpaid.

For additional information, refer to the employee handbook.

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