Illinois PTO Laws: What Employers Must Know (2026)

Illinois passed the broadest state leave mandate in the country and a lot of employers still describe it wrongly in their handbooks.

The Paid Leave for All Workers Act does not create sick leave. It creates leave for any reason — and the "any reason" part is the whole point. An employee can use it to attend a funeral, wait for a plumber, or go to the beach, and you may not ask which.

Layer Chicago's ordinance on top and you have a two-tier system where the answer to "how much leave do we owe?" depends on which side of a city boundary someone works.

This is general information rather than legal advice — confirm current requirements with the Illinois Department of Labor or an employment attorney before finalizing a policy.

The state floor: 40 hours, no questions

Accrual is one hour per 40 hours worked, up to a minimum of 40 hours per 12-month period. You may instead front-load the full 40 hours at the start of the period.

Use may begin after 90 days of employment.

No reason required, no documentation required. This is the rule that makes Illinois different. You cannot require a doctor's note, a form, or an explanation.

Reasonable notice may be required — up to seven calendar days for foreseeable leave, and as soon as practicable otherwise.

Carryover applies to accrued leave. If you accrue rather than front-load, unused hours carry into the next period. Front-loading removes the carryover obligation.

The Chicago layer

Chicago's Paid Leave and Paid Sick and Safe Leave Ordinance provides two separate 40-hour buckets:

That is double the state minimum, in two balances with different rules. Cook County outside Chicago maintains its own ordinance, and some municipalities within the county have opted out of parts of it.

For employers with staff spread across the metro area, this is the practical difficulty: two employees doing the same job can have materially different entitlements based on work location. Your tracking has to be location-aware, or you default everyone to the most generous tier and accept the cost.

Vacation is separate, and it is wages

The Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act has long treated earned vacation as compensation. That has not changed, and it sits alongside PLAWA rather than being replaced by it.

• Earned vacation must be paid out at separation, at the final rate of pay.
• Use-it-or-lose-it is prohibited for earned vacation.
• Reasonable accrual caps are permitted, because pausing accrual is not forfeiture.

This is the same structure as Colorado and California: cap the balance, never delete it.

The design decision: satisfy PLAWA with existing PTO, or add a bucket

Most employers already offering generous PTO can satisfy PLAWA with their existing policy, provided that policy meets every requirement — including the no-documentation rule and the any-reason rule.

That last condition is where existing policies usually fail. A perfectly good 15-day PTO policy that requires manager approval with a stated reason does not satisfy PLAWA, even though it is far more generous in hours.

If you take the first route, the entire PTO bank inherits PLAWA's protections. If you keep vacation strict and add a separate 40-hour bucket, you preserve your approval process for vacation but carry two balances.

What to fix in your handbook

1. Remove reason requirements from whichever bucket satisfies PLAWA.
2. Remove documentation requirements from that same bucket.
3. Check your notice window — you may require up to seven days for foreseeable leave, not more.
4. Delete any vacation forfeiture clause and replace it with an accrual cap.
5. Add location logic if you have Chicago or Cook County staff.
6. State the 12-month period you use — calendar year, anniversary year, or fiscal year — because carryover depends on it.

How to write a PTO policy covers the structure, and the PTO policy generator will produce a draft you can adapt.

Approval workflows need rethinking

Illinois is the state where the process is as regulated as the entitlement. Most PTO approval flows are built around a manager deciding whether a reason is good enough. For the PLAWA bucket, there is no reason to evaluate.

That does not mean you have no say over timing. You can still require notice, and you can still manage coverage. What you cannot do is deny leave because you did not like the explanation — or require an explanation at all.

In practice, teams handle this by treating the PLAWA bucket as scheduling rather than approval: the request is about when, never why. How to deny a time-off request covers doing that defensibly when coverage genuinely does not work.

Tracking two or three balances

Illinois employers frequently end up tracking three separate things: PLAWA leave, Chicago sick leave for some staff, and ordinary vacation with different payout rules. Each has its own accrual rate, carryover behaviour, and payout treatment.

That is more than a spreadsheet handles gracefully, particularly when the applicable rules depend on work location. The PTO accrual calculator will show you what one schedule earns under a given rate, and why spreadsheets break for PTO explains where multi-bucket tracking usually goes wrong — almost always at year-end rollover, when carryover caps differ per bucket and one formula quietly applies the wrong one.