More American Dads Are Taking Parental Leave — and It's Changing Families

Here is a quiet piece of good news from the United States: in the states that have built paid family leave programmes, fathers are actually using them — at rates that would have seemed fanciful twenty years ago, and that are visibly changing what early parenthood looks like.

The figures come from a report by the advocacy organisation Paid Leave For All, covered by The 74 and Reasons to be Cheerful in August 2026. Fourteen US states and Washington, DC now run paid family leave programmes. In most of them, fathers now take nearly equal shares of “bonding leave” — paid time off to be with a new baby — compared with mothers. In two states, Colorado and Washington, men take the greater share.

Key takeaways

• Fourteen US states and DC now have paid family leave; in most, fathers take nearly equal shares of baby-bonding leave — and the share keeps growing year on year.
• The change is behavioural, not just financial: before these programmes, around three-quarters of American fathers took no leave at all for a new baby.
• California’s fathers went from 15% of bonding claims in 2004 to about half today; New Jersey’s tripled their share in fifteen years.
• The research consistently finds paternity leave benefits everyone measured: fathers’ mental health and confidence, mothers’ health and breastfeeding, couples’ stability, and the children themselves.
• For New York readers: Paid Family Leave offers up to 12 weeks at two-thirds of pay (capped), with job protection — and it covers adoption and fostering too.

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From two hours to five months

The report’s human stories carry the point better than the percentages. A Washington State firefighter, A.J. Johnson, describes his first son’s birth in 2019, before his state’s programme paid out: he scraped together six weeks of saved sick leave while older colleagues bragged about taking two hours off for their children’s births. When his second son arrived in late 2021 with the programme fully running, he took roughly five months of combined paid leave. “I was able to more quickly become a more confident parent,” he told The 74 — and by then, he says, the culture around him had flipped: the men he works with now almost uniformly take their full paternity leave.

That cultural shift shows up in the data everywhere the programmes exist. Before any state had one, about three-quarters of American fathers took no leave for a new baby, compared with fewer than one in five mothers. California — the first state to launch, in 2004 — saw men make just 15% of bonding claims in its first year; last year they made about half. New Jersey went from 11% to 33% over fifteen years, helped by higher payments and added job protection. Even the newest programmes are starting well ahead of where California began: in their first year, fathers took 46% of bonding leaves in Delaware and 44% in Maine.

“Virtually all of the growth in bonding leave claims has come from this massive, massive increase in claims from men,” Molly Weston Williamson of the Center for American Progress, the report’s author, told The 74. “Dads taking leave is good for everybody.”

What the evidence says it does

That last claim is well supported. Research on paternity leave has found benefits running in every direction the studies have looked:

• For fathers: better mental health, and confidence from hands-on early caregiving that carries into how they parent for years afterwards — and into closer relationships with their children.
• For mothers: longer breastfeeding, better mental health, higher life satisfaction. A partner at home in the early weeks is not a luxury; it’s infrastructure.
• For couples: fathers who take leave do more domestic work long-term, and some studies find lower divorce rates.
• For children: more time bonded to a second engaged caregiver, with everything that follows from it.

None of this will surprise readers in countries with long-established leave systems, and that’s rather the point — the US is running a natural experiment, state by state, and getting the same answer everyone else got.

The picture by geography

This is one of those stories where where you live matters enormously, so, plainly labelled:

For US readers in the Northeast: New York’s Paid Family Leave is among the country’s stronger programmes — up to 12 weeks at 67% of your average weekly wage (capped at $1,228.53 a week in 2026), with job protection, continued health insurance, and protection from retaliation. It covers bonding with a newly born, adopted or fostered child — worth underlining for foster families, who are often unsure it applies to them. New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island run their own programmes. If you’re in one of the 36 states without a programme, your employer may still offer paid leave — only around 14% of Americans had access to employer paid paternity leave as of 2018, but that number is slowly rising.

For UK readers: statutory paternity leave remains two weeks at a flat rate — far behind these US state schemes on generosity, though Shared Parental Leave lets couples split up to 50 weeks between them, and take-up remains low partly because too few families know it exists.

The trend line, though, points one way. Year on year, in every state with data, fathers’ share of bonding leave keeps rising — and the report’s author says the numbers suggest a lasting shift, not a blip. Wherever paid leave exists, it turns out, fathers had wanted this all along.

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Sources: Reasons to be Cheerful / The 74 — More American Dads Are Taking Parental Leave (August 2026), reporting the Paid Leave For All report and CEPR analysis; New York State Paid Family Leave (2026 rates).