Connecticut Paid Leave reports rising claims and growing weekly payments

The Connecticut Paid Leave Board of Directors heard a claims administration update Feb. 13 showing program growth and higher weekly payouts.

John Scott, providing the claims administration update, said the three-month claims trend included 24,801 claims received, with a monthly moving average of 8,267. "January 2025 year over year claim volume was 6.81% higher than January of 2024, and January 2025 represents the second highest number of monthly claims filed at 9,029 claims filed," Scott said.

The report compared year-over-year totals and counted a separate "bonding" segment inside pregnancy-related filings, which CT Paid Leave counts as an additional case when reporting comparably with other states. Scott said including the bonding segment produced a year-over-year growth in cases filed of 10.23% and increased the program's approved-claims total to more than 80,000 when bonding segments were included.

Scott also presented benefit and demographic trends. He said the largest leave reason was "own injury and illness" at 48.63% of claims, followed by bonding at 24.17%, pregnancy/childbirth at 13.46% and caregiver at 13.14%. He reported that unique employees paid by CTPL exceeded 142,000 and that the program has paid more than $1,000,000,000 in total benefits to Connecticut workers.

Weekly payments have grown, Scott said, driven by increased claim volume, a higher approval rate and minimum wage increases that raised weekly benefit rates. "The weekly payments trend line graph shows significant weekly payment growth to an average of $8,450,000 per week over the last 26 weeks," he said, and noted seasonal dips in November and December of prior years.

Board members asked about oversight and quality assurance. Molly Weston Williamson highlighted the authority's random audits of vendor adjudications, saying the audits are resource intensive but valuable. "That random audit piece is really important," Williamson said. Scott confirmed the authority conducts ongoing audits and that those audits have helped identify issues and feed process improvements with the vendor.

The presentation also covered customer-facing changes: web claim filing remained strong at 73% of claims filed, opt-in for email and text messaging were high, and recent website and portal redesigns with Aflac have helped drive higher approvals and lower denial rates, Scott said.

The board did not take a binding action at the time of the update; staff said the data were provided for oversight and planning.