Sometime before September 30, California’s Governor has to sign or veto Senate Bill 1149, a short bill that would let an employee take bereavement leave for someone who was never on the list. It was enrolled and presented to the Governor on August 24, and if you run benefits for a company with anyone in California, it reopens a question most policies treat as long settled: who counts as family.
What the bill actually does
California has required bereavement leave since AB 1949 passed in 2022, up to five days for the death of a spouse, child, parent, sibling, grandparent, grandchild, domestic partner or parent-in-law. SB 1149, authored by Senator María Elena Durazo, adds a category that already exists elsewhere in California leave law: the designated person. Under AB 1041, passed the same year, an employee can name someone whose relationship to them is like family even without a blood or legal tie, and use caregiving leave for them. SB 1149 extends that same idea to bereavement, and an employer can limit an employee to one designated person in any twelve month period.
Durazo put the logic plainly in her office’s release on the bill: if California lets you take time off to care for someone while they are seriously ill, you should be able to take time off to mourn them when they die. Ogletree Deakins, which tracks California employment legislation, listed SB 1149 among the bills sitting on the Governor’s desk in a September 15 update. None of it is law yet. But the direction has been clear for a while, and other states tend to watch California on leave.
Most bereavement policies were never built for this
Here is the operational problem, and it is not really a legal one: the list in a bereavement policy is doing two jobs at once. It sets who qualifies, and it quietly sets who the company believes a person’s people are. Those two things drifted apart a long time ago.
The employee raising a niece. The woman whose closest friend of thirty years was the one listed on her medical forms. The man who drove his neighbor to chemo every Thursday for a year. Every benefits leader I have talked to has already approved one of these as an exception, usually over email, usually without a policy to point at.
What SB 1149 would do is take that informal judgment and give it a shape. Someone has to ask the employee to name a person, and someone has to decide when that naming happens, where it is recorded, and what happens if it is never recorded until the worst week of somebody’s life. That is an HR systems question more than a legal one, and it lands right in the middle of open enrollment season, which is either bad timing or the best possible timing depending on how prepared you are.
What happens on day six
I want to be careful here, because this could read as an argument against the bill and it isn’t. Five days for a chosen family member is better than zero days, and the people this bill covers have been doing the work of family without the standing of family for a long time.
But anyone who has actually lost someone knows the shape of those five days. You get the call. You start looking for documents, then you find out there are no documents. You call the funeral home and learn what things cost. You write something to read aloud, you get through the service, and then you go back to work with a small fraction of it finished.
The estate is not settled in five days. Probate has not opened. Accounts are still in the person’s name, the passwords are still in their head, and the family has not yet had the conversation about the house. What the employee comes back to is a second job they never applied for, and they do it from their desk, on their phone, between meetings, for months. Bereavement leave was never designed to cover that, and expanding who qualifies for it does not change what happens on day six.
What benefits leaders can do this month
A few things are worth doing while the bill is still on the desk, and they hold up whether or not it gets signed.
Find out whether your bereavement policy already lets a manager approve leave outside the listed relationships, because many do, informally, and the practice is usually further along than the document. Decide where a designated person would be captured if you needed to capture one, and resist the urge to build a new form when the emergency contact field is already sitting there doing almost nothing. Read your leave policy next to what your EAP actually delivers, since in most companies those two documents have never been read side by side. And ask your employment counsel what changes if it is signed, because that is their job and not mine.
Then the harder one: ask what your company offers an employee in the six months after the five days end. In a lot of companies the honest answer is a phone number.
The benefit the benefits industry forgot to build
My grandfather was a quiet man of means, generous and steady and private about his money. He died without a plan, and my family spent years piecing together decisions that had only ever lived in his head. My aunt sat at his kitchen table looking for a blue folder that was never found.
None of that was a leave policy problem. All of it was a readiness problem, and readiness is the only part of this that can be solved before the phone rings. A policy decides how much time someone gets. Preparation decides what they can actually do with it.
That is why SB 1149 is worth watching even if it gets vetoed. The bill is the system admitting that the definition of family it inherited is too narrow. The next admission, and I think it is coming, is that five days of support after a death was never enough time to match the size of the task.
That gap is the reason we built KinWell: family readiness, before families need it. It gives your people one place to organize documents, name who should be called, and record what they want, so that when the five days come, they are spent grieving instead of searching. If you are shaping your 2027 benefits this month, it is worth a look at bestfarewell.com/employers.