Does family leave only apply to companies with 50 employees?

This is probably the most expensive misunderstanding on this whole site, because the wrong number is not a guess — it is a real threshold from a real statute, just the wrong one. Fifty employees is the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. California wrote its own, and Government Code § 12945.2 applies to any employer who directly employs five or more people.

An employee qualifies after more than 12 months of service with at least 1,250 hours worked in the previous 12 months, and is then entitled to as much as 12 weeks of job-protected leave within a 12-month period. Job-protected is the operative phrase: the leave itself is unpaid, and wage replacement, if any, comes from a separate state programme. Confusing the two produces the second most common error here — an employer who believes that because they are not paying, nothing is owed.

The family definition is broader than the federal one and this catches people out. It covers a child, parent, grandparent, grandchild, sibling, spouse and domestic partner. It also allows the employee to name one "designated person" per 12-month period — someone related by blood or whose association is the equivalent of a family relationship. A request to care for a sibling or a grandparent is not outside the statute simply because it would be outside FMLA.

What makes a denial costly is what usually follows it. The employee who was told they did not qualify goes on leave anyway, or complains, and the response to that becomes a second and independent claim. The original refusal might have been an honest reading of the wrong statute; the thing that happens next rarely reads that way to anyone reviewing it later.

If your company has five or more employees in California, the working assumption should be that this law applies to you, and the question worth asking is which of your people have crossed 12 months and 1,250 hours.