Human Resource Blog

Texas Short Term Disability

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One of our employees is out of work for 3 weeks due to a non-work-related auto accident. In Texas, is she entitled to disability pay under any state or federal law?

No, not in Texas. No Texas state law or federal law will provide you with any income for a short-term disability, regardless of the cause of that disability.

You may want to double check with your group health insurance carrier to be certain that the policy doesn’t include any short term disability benefits. Social Security will pay disability benefits, but only if your employee is disabled for 5 months or more.

If the employee was injured on the job, you might have considered workers’ comp. It may provide the employee with medical benefits as well as disability pay. However, from what you say, it doesn’t apply to this case.

While it’s unpaid leave, the FMLA, or Family and Medical Leave Act, provides up to 12 weeks of leave a year. The leave is job-protected, meaning the job is guaranteed on the employee’s return. Under FMLA, employees qualify if they have what is called a medically certified “serious medical condition.” FMLA applies to most employers in the U.S. with 50 or more employees. Normally, employees must have worked at least 1,250 hours in the past 12 months to qualify.

The Pregnancy Disability Act guarantees parity of pregnancy leave benefits with other types of disability benefits. If employers offer other kinds of benefits, they must offer the same benefits for pregnant women on medical disability.

Workers have short-term disability payment protection in five states as well as Puerto Rico. They are California, New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii. In Rhode Island, payroll deductions fund a state plan providing disability insurance, while elsewhere the states simply mandate that employers provide short-term disability payments to their workers. Normally, there is a one-week waiting period for these plans. They pay disabled employees anywhere from 52 weeks of benefits in California, to 26 weeks of benefits in Rhode Island. Payments range from 50% in New York to 66% in New Jersey.