A California employee tells you they need to miss three days of work next month for a court hearing. They're not on trial — they're the victim. Do you owe them pay for that time, unpaid leave, or nothing at all? As of this year, the answer changed, and the agency that enforces it changed too.
Assembly Bill 406 didn't arrive with much fanfare. It was signed in September 2024, phased in quietly across two effective dates, and easy to miss if you were tracking the bigger headline California employment laws of the last two years. But for any California employer — even a five-person shop — AB 406 rewrote who can use paid sick leave, for what, and who polices it when you get it wrong.
What AB 406 Actually Does
California has required unpaid, job-protected leave for crime victims and their family members to attend judicial proceedings since long before AB 406. Labor Code sections 230.2 and 230.5 already covered victims of specified violent crimes who needed time off to appear in court. What those sections never resolved was whether an employee could use their accrued, paid sick leave to cover that time, or whether they were stuck taking the day unpaid.
AB 406 closes that gap in two stages:
October 1, 2025 — Employees gained the right to use accrued paid sick leave (PSL) under California's Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Families Act for jury duty, subpoenaed witness testimony, and additional crime-victim-related absences. Before this date, jury duty and witness appearances typically meant unpaid time off unless an employer voluntarily offered otherwise.
January 1, 2026 — The definition of covered "judicial proceedings" expanded significantly. Employees (or a family member who is a victim) can now use PSL to attend not just a criminal trial, but also delinquency proceedings, post-arrest release decisions, plea hearings, sentencing, post-conviction release decisions, and essentially any proceeding where the victim's rights are at issue. That's a much wider window than "the trial date" — it covers the whole pipeline of hearings a criminal case generates, many of which get scheduled with little notice.
Also effective January 1, 2026: enforcement authority for the leave provisions under Labor Code 230.2 and 230.5 moved from the Labor Commissioner's office to California's Civil Rights Department (CRD) — the same agency that handles harassment, discrimination, and retaliation claims. That's not a cosmetic change. CRD's complaint process, remedies, and posting requirements differ from the Labor Commissioner's, and it means a leave dispute can now sit alongside a discrimination charge in the same investigative pipeline.
Why the Enforcement Shift Matters More Than the Leave Expansion
Employers tend to focus on "what leave do I owe" and skip past "who's checking." That's a mistake here. CRD already requires a mandatory workplace notice — "Survivors of Violence and Family Members of Victims: Right to Leave and Reasonable Accommodations" — that must be posted, and provided to new hires and annually to all employees, not just handed out when someone asks. Missing or outdated postings are the kind of paperwork gap that turns a minor leave dispute into a broader compliance finding, because CRD auditors reviewing one complaint routinely check whether required notices were current.
The practical risk isn't that a small business will deny someone their day in court. It's that a request will get mishandled procedurally — treated as a generic unpaid personal day instead of protected crime-victim leave, logged incorrectly, or never accompanied by the required notice — and that paperwork gap becomes the actual violation CRD pursues.
Who This Applies To
Unlike some California leave mandates that carve out small employers, the Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Families Act's paid sick leave protections apply to every California employer, regardless of size, for any employee who works 30 or more days within a year of starting. If you have even one W-2 employee in California, AB 406's PSL expansion applies to you. The underlying crime-victim leave protections in Labor Code 230.2 and 230.5 have their own employer-size thresholds for some provisions, but the PSL-usage rights AB 406 added ride on top of the sick leave law's near-universal coverage.
What Small Business Owners Need to Do
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Update your written sick leave policy. If your handbook still describes PSL as covering only illness, preventive care, and safe-time absences (domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking), it's outdated. Add jury duty, subpoenaed witness appearances, and the expanded judicial-proceeding categories effective January 2026.
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Post and distribute the CRD notice. Get the current "Survivors of Violence and Family Members of Victims" notice from CRD, post it where other required labor notices go, and build it into new-hire paperwork and your annual notice cycle — not a one-time task.
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Train whoever approves time-off requests. The person who processes leave requests needs to recognize when an employee is describing a covered judicial proceeding versus a routine personal day, because the two get treated very differently under the law and require different documentation.
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Know your accrual and cap rules. Standard PSL accrual is one hour per 30 hours worked, with employers allowed to cap accrual at 80 hours (10 days) and cap annual usage at 40 hours (5 days) — or provide 40 hours/5 days upfront. AB 406 doesn't change these caps; it changes what qualifies as a reason to draw on the balance you're already required to track.
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Keep records that would survive a CRD inquiry. Document the reason for leave (in general terms that protect the employee's privacy — you don't need case specifics), the dates, and confirmation that PSL was applied rather than an unpaid absence, if the employee elected to use accrued time.
Where This Fits Into Your Bookkeeping
Paid sick leave isn't just an HR policy question — it's a payroll liability you're required to track. Every accrued hour is a real obligation on your books, whether or not an employee ever cashes it in, and California auditors (Labor Commissioner or CRD) can ask to see your accrual and usage records going back years. Employers who track PSL loosely — in a shared spreadsheet, or worse, only in the payroll processor's black box — often can't reconstruct exactly why a given absence was paid when it matters most.
Plain-text accounting makes this easier to get right. When PSL accruals and usage are recorded as line items in a version-controlled ledger rather than buried in a proprietary payroll export, you get an auditable trail: every hour accrued, every hour used, and — increasingly relevant under AB 406 — a clean record of why. That distinction matters when the "why" determines which state agency is on the other end of a dispute.
Simplify Your Financial Management
Tracking paid sick leave accruals, usage categories, and the compliance paperwork behind them is exactly the kind of recordkeeping that gets messy fast in a growing business. Beancount.io offers plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.