Earned sick and safe time starts at your first employee, not your fiftieth

By David J.S. Madgett

Minnesota attorney, license no. 390494 · Published August 7, 2026

New employers routinely assume Minnesota’s earned sick and safe time law is a big-company problem. It is not. Under Minn. Stat. § 181.9445, an employer is “a person who has one or more employees.”

One.

Who is an employee

The threshold is on the worker’s side, and it is low: any person employed by an employer “who is anticipated by the employer to perform work for at least 80 hours in a year for that employer in Minnesota.”

Eighty hours in a year. Two full-time weeks. A part-timer working six hours a week clears it by March. Temporary and part-time workers count.

The definition excludes independent contractors, certain volunteer and on-call firefighters and ambulance personnel, elected officials, and farm workers employed 28 days or less annually. It does not exclude your first hire, your part-time bookkeeper, or your seasonal help.

That “independent contractor” exclusion is doing a lot of work, and it is exactly the place an employer is most likely to be wrong about their own classification — see the 14-factor construction test for how unforgiving Minnesota can be on that question.

The arithmetic

Section 181.9446:

• Accrual: “one hour of earned sick and safe time for every 30 hours worked.”
• Annual cap: a “maximum of 48 hours of earned sick and safe time in a year.”
• Carryover: employers “must permit an employee to carry over accrued but unused sick and safe time into the following year.”
• Balance ceiling: the total accrued but unused “must not exceed 80 hours at any time.”

So a full-time employee accrues roughly 69 hours a year at the base rate but is capped at 48 in a year, carries the unused balance forward, and can bank up to 80 hours total. Carryover is not optional, and neither is it unlimited.

What it can be used for

Section 181.9447 is broader than “sick,” which is why the statute says safe too. Accrued time covers:

• the employee’s own illness, injury, or health condition, and preventive care;
• care of a family member with an illness, injury, or health condition;
• absence due to domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking — to seek medical attention, victim services, counseling, relocation, or legal action;
• closure of the employee’s workplace due to weather or public emergency, or closure of a family member’s school or care facility;
• inability to work because the employer prohibited it over communicable disease concerns, or while awaiting diagnostic test results; and
• when a health authority determines the employee’s presence would jeopardize community health.

The weather-closure provision is worth noticing in Minnesota specifically. A January storm that closes your shop is not simply an unpaid day for your staff.

Practical consequences for a new employer

• Track hours worked from day one, including for part-time staff. Accrual is a function of hours worked, so you cannot reconstruct it later from a salary figure.
• Show the balance. Employees need to know what they have, and you need to be able to prove what they accrued.
• Build carryover into your payroll system before the first year-end, not after.
• Do not treat a generous PTO policy as automatic compliance. A single pooled PTO bank can satisfy the obligation, but only if it meets the statute’s accrual, carryover, and permitted-use requirements. Check yours against all three rather than assuming.
• Remember this is separate from Paid Leave. Chapter 268B is a different program with different funding — see Minnesota Paid Leave. Both apply to the same small employer at the same time.