Emilie Aries, founder of Bossed Up, a leadership development and career services company, speaks at a Women in Lighting Design workshop on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Denver, Colo. Photo by Joe Mahoney / Special to The Colorado Trust
Emilie Aries, founder of Bossed Up, a leadership development and career services company, speaks at a Women in Lighting Design workshop on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Denver, Colo. Photo by Joe Mahoney / Special to The Colorado Trust
Donna Thompson didn’t want to use a cane, but she was running out of options. After years of living with debilitating hip and knee pain, the 66-year-old needed extra assistance to get around.
Though she’d retired from her office manager job four years ago and moved to Colorado from Kansas, Thompson was still working two jobs—at a consignment clothing store and handling bookkeeping at a Sprouts Farmers Market—for extra income. She couldn’t afford to take time off for surgery.
When she called her medical provider in late 2023 to inquire about taking short-term disability, the insurer told her about Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance program (known as FAMLI). The statewide program offers up to 12 weeks of paid time off for childbirth or bonding with a new child, sick leave for oneself or to care for a family member, tackling urgent safety needs in the case of domestic violence, or time to arrange for a family member’s military deployment. It was created via a ballot initiative in November 2020, and the state began doling out payments to eligible recipients on Jan. 1, 2024.
The initiative was Thompson’s saving grace. “I waited and waited [to have surgery] because of income and having to be off work,” the Arvada resident said. “This just saved me from the pain.”
Thompson was able to rest and recover for eight weeks after her June 2024 surgery without worrying that her bills and rent would be covered. Without FAMLI, she said she likely would have returned to work before it was medically recommended and hampered her recovery.
“After the pain of the surgery and the pain of recovery, worrying about the money was one less pain for me,” she said.
Nearly all Colorado workers are eligible for FAMLI funds, including those who are self-employed (they can opt in to the program by paying premiums for a three-year period). Companies and employees began paying into FAMLI’s coffers in 2023. Since the start of 2024, when people were eligible to apply for the benefit, claims have been filed across the state. As of July, more than 60% have been made by women, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE), and the majority of claimants are between the ages of 25 and 44.
Emilie Aries, founder of “Bossed Up,” far left, participates in a discussion with other attendees of a Women in Lighting Design workshop on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Denver, Colo. Photo by Joe Mahoney / Special to The Colorado Trust
Employees of companies that use a private plan providing equal or better benefits as FAMLI are exempt from participating, as are federal employees. Local government employers can also opt out, though employees can choose to participate.
FAMLI is funded by employers and employees. The legislature passed a law this year that lowered the premium to 0.88% of the employee’s wage, with half paid by the employer. (Businesses with fewer than 10 employees do not need to pay the employer share.) Benefit amounts are determined using a sliding scale and can reach up to 90% of a person’s wages.
Since Jan. 7, 2024, through July 21 of this year, 282,813 applications had been submitted and 193,299 fulfilled. More than $1.1 billion has been paid out to claimants. In its first full year, the FAMLI fund paid out $132 million more than a 2022 actuarial study projected. As of early July, the state had distributed about 34% of the expected benefit payments for this year.
Though some claimants have found the claims system confusing and had difficulty getting their questions answered, Tracy Marshall, the FAMLI division director, said she would consider the first year of the insurance fund a success. “Our goal is always: We take care of people with empathy and compassion and quickly,” she said. “I think, personally, that we’ve met those goals.”
Emilie Aries, a senior leadership development specialist at a local aerospace company, has worked with FAMLI as an employee and an employer. Thanks to the fund, her husband has been able to stay home every Thursday to care for their six-month-old daughter. Additional assistance from another family member means they only pay for child care three days a week. With a 3-year-old son in preschool, the savings are critical.
“As someone who believes in gender equity and is trying actively to close the gender leadership gap, making sure men and women, when they become parents, both have equal access to equal amounts of time for bonding, for child care providing, is such a game changer,” she said.
Aries is founder and CEO of Bossed Up, a leadership development and career services company. She took the aerospace job to help cover thousands of dollars in monthly child care expenses. With her son, Aries said she was “saving pennies” to take maternity leave. FAMLI simplified the situation the second time around. “It made having a second child possible financially,” Aries said.
As an employer, she’s seen benefits, too. Because she only has a handful of employees, Aries doesn’t have to pay into FAMLI as a business owner, but her employees can still benefit from the program.
“It levels the playing field for small businesses like mine to compete for talent with big companies who have long been able to match their employees with paid parental leave,” Aries said. And, with an employee about to head out on maternity leave, Aries is less stressed about how that will impact her business finances since the state will be covering the salary payments. That frees up money for Aries to hire temporary help. “It allows me to do right by my employees and do right by my customers,” she said.
Emilie Aries, left, with her husband, Brad Bolte, right, holding their daughter Josephine, 8 months, during breakfast at their home, as Aries assembles a straw and lid for her son Max, 3, on Thursday morning, June 19, 2025, in Arvada, Colo. Photo by Joe Mahoney / Special to The Colorado Trust
FAMLI provides flexibility, but hurdles still exist
Colorado is one of 13 states, plus Washington, D.C., to offer a paid family and medical leave benefit. Workers can take leave all at once or intermittently throughout the year. “It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all program,” Marshall said. “It’s a flexibility [that] folks might not have been used to having previously.”
Since FAMLI started, the majority of claims filed were for medical leave to care for oneself, followed by parental bonding leave.
Not everything has been smooth sailing, though. Some workers, like Thompson, have found information scarce. “I had to dig a little bit myself even though I was in HR there [at Sprouts] to find out what was available to me through FAMLI,” she said.
Another Denver-area employee complained of difficulty connecting with anyone when she needed help with her application.
Tassi Keith, a publication relations consultant, had been saving for her son’s birth. As a business of one, she didn’t have access to employer-funded maternity leave, so she planned to put aside money to cover her time out of office.
When she heard about FAMLI, she was ecstatic. Then she was induced early. By the time Keith got around to completing the FAMLI paperwork, she was outside the 30-day window to file a claim. Exhausted from new motherhood, she found the process extremely difficult. “It wasn’t very intuitive or user-friendly,” she recalled.
Keith spent a month trying to get someone on the phone and hung up once after being on hold for two hours. She almost gave up on pursuing the funds. Her son was born in July, but Keith didn’t receive her first payment until November after finally receiving the help she needed and starting her claim a month later than she’d planned. (A lump-sum deposit did cover her October leave.)
“In theory, the program works amazingly. I’m so happy that I was able to get some pretty good compensation for the three months of time I was out of the office that I would have had to pay myself directly and come out of my pocket,” she said, but “it was just very cumbersome getting there.”
According to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, there are 123 people working in FAMLI’s contact center. The average response time when Keith was calling was 2.5 minutes; as of June, Marshall said, 84% of calls were answered within five minutes, with 38% of callers assisted by the system’s Intelligent Virtual Agent.
Emilie Aries, center, holds her 8-month-old daughter Josephine’s hand as the baby and Aries’ son, Max, 3, get ready for a nap on Thursday, June 19, 2025, at their home in Arvada, Colo. Photo by Joe Mahoney / Special to The Colorado Trust
Marshall acknowledged there will always be “growing pains” with a program of this size and scope. Some upgrades have been made over the past year, including developing a benefits dashboard to help employers better manage and have timely knowledge about employees on FAMLI leave, and launching a health care provider portal through which physicians and others can submit necessary documentation on behalf of their patients. And a state bill that passed at the end of legislative session extends leave for up to 12 additional weeks for a parent with a child in a neonatal intensive care unit.
Outreach continues to be a focus for the FAMLI Division. Marshall said her team is employing “targeted efforts” to reach workers who previously weren’t able to access this type of support, including self-employed, seasonal, part-time and low-income workers. “I feel they’ll always be one of the more challenging groups to get to because they may just have the assumption in the back of their minds that it doesn’t include them,” she said.
Overall, though, Marshall said the program is running smoothly. Less than 2% of claim applications are fraudulent, she said. And the program seems to be reaching at least some of the audience it was designed for. According to CDLE, approximately 47% of claimants in 2024 received a wage replacement benefit payment that was 70% or higher of their pay; halfway through 2025, this had risen to roughly 56% of claimants, receiving $886 per week in wage replacement.
The department received an updated actuarial analysis in June, which indicated that the FAMLI fund is healthy and there are no concerns about projections, according to the division.
