Men filed 51% of California's paid bonding-leave claims in 2025, but a claim is not a week off

Men filed 51% of the paid bonding-leave claims in California in 2025, the first year they outnumbered women in the state's program, NPR reported on October 25, 2026. When the program started in 2004, men made up about 18% of claim applications.

The count, and who is counted

The claims come from California's paid family leave program, which pays workers to bond with a child within a year of a birth, an adoption or a foster placement. It offers up to eight weeks, on top of six to eight weeks of paid disability leave that mothers get to recover after birth. The 51% is a share of claims. It is not a share of weeks taken, and it says nothing about who handled the night feeds.

NPR gives no figure for how many weeks mothers and fathers each took.

The crossover is not only Californian. NPR notes that men also surpassed women among bonding claimants in Colorado and Washington, and that in several other states men make up about half of bonding claim applications. Williamson said she has also seen dads take a higher share of claims in those states in recent years, and that "we're in a very different place in terms of our understanding of gender roles, of paternity leave, of dads' roles than we were 20-plus years ago."

Molly Weston Williamson, policy director at Paid Leave for All, an organization that advocates for paid family leave policies, said the new data is useful and incomplete. "We're getting one particular vantage point into this data, which is useful and valuable, but it's only telling us sort of part of the story, and we'd need other kinds of information to better understand the full picture," she told NPR. She then asked two questions the claims cannot answer: "Is it that more dads are working and therefore are potentially eligible for these benefits? Is it that women are deciding not to take leave?" The California Employment Development Department, which administers the program, told NPR it could not provide definitive reasons for the increase. The figures also leave out anyone on a private employer's own paid leave, since they reflect only people who took leave through the state program.

A tidy statistic, then, with its own footnotes.

One father, three births

Karlo Campana, who works at an ad agency, has three children under age 4. He took paid time off in May after the birth of his son, as he did for his daughters. LAist, which profiled him in July, says he took four weeks.

"My wife isn't doing it on her own," he said. "She doesn't feel like she's alone on this journey. She feels like she has support." NPR's report does not include his wife's account of those weeks, so the ledger is kept by the person who took the leave.

Campana said he first hesitated because of lingering gender stereotypes. "I felt guilty, for sure," he said, adding that he thinks dads maybe feel they need to be the provider. His own father worked three jobs, and it was hard for him to be present.

NPR adds that research links paternity leave to better health outcomes for both parents, and paid parental leave to lower odds of postpartum depression. It names no study. An earlier Reflets brief on a psychologist's case for paternity leave in Time found that the argument rests on correlational research, which is a fair caution to carry here too.

A price change that arrived before the headline

Before 2025, most California workers on family leave received 60% of their pay. Since then they can receive 70% to 90%. Williamson said that makes leave a realistic option for many more families, and that she sees dads and moms responding to the change.

Jenya Cassidy, director of the California Work & Family Coalition, another advocacy group, told LAist that she heard from many fathers who went on bonding leave and returned to work when the first check arrived, because 60% of their pay would not cover their bills. Both women work for organizations that campaign for leave, so their explanations are informed and interested at once.

The program is paid for by the people who use it and the people who may one day use it. California is among six states where family leave is entirely funded by employee payroll deductions, and the program covers about 18 million workers in the state.

The backdrop is money. According to the latest American Family Survey, in 2025 seven in 10 Americans said raising children had become unaffordable, the biggest single-year jump since the survey started more than a decade ago. Jeremy Pope, a Brigham Young University professor of political science and a principal investigator of the survey, said people worry a lot about how much children cost and would like to see ways of making those costs smaller or getting help with them. He added that he does not think they want government involved in the decision to have kids.

The timing is awkward for a federal government that has said it wants Americans to have more babies. President Trump has said, "We want more babies," and has promoted expanding access to in vitro fertilization and offering investment accounts for newborns. NPR sets that goal beside a state program that pays parents to stay home for up to eight weeks, and beside the fact that no federal law guarantees paid parental leave.

Two ways to weigh the same fathers

The California share sits against a gloomier number. A working paper from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, using American Community Survey data that runs to 2019, found that 95% of fathers take zero weeks of leave. It put the average at 0.6 weeks for fathers against 7.2 weeks for mothers.

The American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank, published a rebuttal on June 10, 2026, written by Anders Knospe and Richard V. Reeves. Its argument concerns the yardstick. The Fed measure counts a parent as on leave only after a full week with no paid work, so a father who works Monday and stays home Tuesday through Friday counts as taking none.

That matters because fathers are nearly four times as likely as mothers to take leave intermittently rather than in one block: 27% against 7%, according to a 2018 US Department of Labor survey. The institute's own data note, drawn from state records in Oregon and New Jersey, puts the intermittent share of bonding applications at 25% and 38%.

Using the New America 2026 Parent Survey, fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago with over 2,000 fathers of children under six, the institute finds that 80% of fathers took time off at a birth, against 89% of mothers. Half of the fathers who took leave took two weeks or less. Half of all the fathers surveyed said they took less time than they would have wanted.

Washington State's records show how the scale tips with the measure. Fathers averaged the equivalent of 8.1 weeks of paid leave, spread over 13.9 calendar weeks, while mothers took 8.3 weeks over 10.6 calendar weeks. In total weeks the two are nearly level. In calendar time, fathers stretch it out.

The institute has a position, and it ends with one: "Paid leave works: for Dads as well as Moms." Its own caveats are plain. Uptake among fathers ranged from 3 in 4 in Washington to 1 in 4 in New Jersey, and those rates count fathers who are ineligible for their state's program, such as the self-employed.

Britain's side of the scale

In the United Kingdom, fathers are entitled to two weeks of paternity leave, which a University of Bath report describes as often poorly paid. The same report, first published on June 30, 2025, finds that women's employment drops by 15 percentage points around childbirth while men's work patterns remain unchanged. It estimates that six weeks at 90% of average earnings could deliver net social benefits of up to £12.8 billion a year, a figure its authors present as a case for reform.

Estimates differ. An article in The Conversation puts the net gain from the same six-week design at around £2.7 billion a year, and Bath's own later model of a broader redesign swings between a £10.1 billion gain and a £6.3 billion cost, depending on one line item.

The Conversation piece also lists what changed this year. Paternity leave became a day-one right on April 6, 2026, but statutory pay rose only from £187.18 to £194.32 a week, and fewer than two in every 100 eligible fathers use Shared Parental Leave. Its comparison is Spain, which equalised leave at 16 weeks for each parent in 2021, after which paternal uptake rose from 46% to over 75%.

In the United States there is no federal law guaranteeing paid parental leave. California is one of 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., that have passed paid family leave laws, and men now file about half of the bonding claims in several of them.

The Pew Research Center found, in a recent survey of full-time working parents who are not self-employed, that 84% said paid parental, family or medical leave would be extremely or very helpful to them, while only half said it was available to them.

Sources

• Dads are taking more parental leave than the headlines suggest, American Institute for Boys and Men, June 10, 2026
• Six weeks for Dads: New report calls for overhaul of UK paternity leave offer, University of Bath, June 30, 2025