Human Resource Blog

Pregnancy Discrimination and Vacation Pay

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I was terminated after 90 days of employment. Should I receive vacation pay? My termination falls under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

The answer is almost certainly “no,” although it would be good to know which state the employee is in.  

It’s important to understand the difference between accrued and earned vacation. Under many payroll systems, an employee begins to accrue vacation shortly after they are hired. The number of hours of accrued vacation are often shown on the paycheck stub.

However, in most cases, employees are not eligible to use the accrued vacation time until they have been with the company for 1 year. (A few companies allow employees to begin using vacation after 6 months.)

This can be a little confusing, since older payroll programs may call “earned” vacation “accrued” vacation. In some cases, even state laws refer to “accrued” vacation. But in almost every case, an employee is not entitled to payment for vacation time upon termination, if he or she would not have been eligible to use the vacation time if still employed.

Because you mention pregnancy discrimination in the question, we’ll touch on that as well. Basically, the PDA or Pregnancy Discrimination Act is an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The PDA merely states that employers must treat pregnant women the same way that they treat other employees. And, they must treat employees on pregnancy disability (or childbirth and childbirth recovery)  the same way that they treat other employees who have a short term disability.

Under PDA, it is illegal to fire an employee BECAUSE she is pregnant. But, it is perfectly legal to terminate a worker for another reason, even if she happens to be expecting.

So not every employment situation involving a pregnant woman is a case of pregnancy discrimination.

And, an employee’s pregnancy doesn’t change the employer’s responsibility to pay vacation.