Oregon’s new paid family and medical leave program is seeing early signs of greater-than-anticipated demand, while money collected to fund the benefits is slightly coming up short.

Preliminary data suggest applicants are requesting more leave time than forecast, potentially incurring greater costs. In contrast, contributions collected from both employers and employees seem to be slightly trailing expectations.

The program, which reached a milestone Sunday as it began to offer benefits, has received over 11,300 applications as of Tuesday, according to data shared this week with its advisory committee.

The majority of those claims were for bonding with a new child and for medical leave — about 5,900 and 3,418, respectively — while just over 1,200 applications were for family leave, the data showed.

Roughly 750 were for safe leave for people who experienced sexual assault, stalking or domestic violence.

While the average length of requests for family and medical leave — about seven weeks each — align closely with the state’s forecasts, the length for bonding leave requests seem to be about a week longer than initially anticipated.

According to the data shared to advisory members, the state anticipated the average request for bonding leave to be around 9.5 weeks, but applications submitted so far show an average request of 10.45 weeks.

Karen Madden Humelbaugh, the director of Paid Leave Oregon, said in some cases the small number of applications is skewing the data. For example, the average safe leave request is several times longer than officials anticipated, but Humelbaugh said they represent only about 1% of claims received, adding that “they’re not going to have a really large impact on the trust.”

The Oregon Legislature established the program in 2019, making Oregon one of just 11 states, along with Washington, D.C., to offer paid family and medical leave.

Oregon’s program is funded by a payroll tax of 1% on gross wages. Employers with 25 or more workers pay 40% of the contribution while employees pay 60%.

As of the end of June, the program had collected about $413 million, about $3.75 million short of what officials projected that the program would collect in the first two quarters of this year.

Earlier this year, collections had fallen short, and the Legislature passed a bill giving the employment department the flexibility to further delay its launch — originally scheduled for January — if it wasn’t adequately funded, but department officials elected to go ahead with the September launch.

“This is exactly why we want to keep an eye on all those data points, whether it be the amount of wages going out or the amount of time people are applying for and then the actual numbers of claims we’re getting,” Humelbaugh said during a media briefing Thursday. “We are looking at that literally on a daily basis.”

As of Sunday, the program had approved just over 1,800 applications, according to Humelbaugh. She added that applications have been “taking longer to process,” often slowed because applicants haven’t yet supplied required documentation.

Humelbaugh said that employees should have their documentation ready before they start the process. Employees can find out what documents they need through Paid Leave Oregon’s toolkit and guidebook. The state has put together an application checklist, as well as a video to help employees through the application process.

In a presentation to advisory members on Wednesday, Humelbaugh said that program officials have adjusted their forecasts according to the early trends they’re seeing. For example, officials now expect to see closer to 63,200 applications by the end of the year, compared to 43,000 that they initially anticipated to receive.

Humelbaugh said that they’ve also shifted their assumptions for the average duration of bonding leave, as well as safe leave. Officials now anticipate bonding leave requests to average around 9.5 weeks and 2 weeks for safe leave requests.

“Obviously, our assumptions in our forecasting on contributions weren’t 100% accurate, and they likely won’t be for benefits,” Humelbaugh told advisory members on Wednesday. “If the current trend continues, we may need to adjust some of these leave types and see what that does to the inputs and outputs.”

And the program may also ask the state Legislature to reduce benefits or increase contributions to keep costs in line with funding.

She said that if the program continues to see a high volume of applications, longer leave requests and high weekly benefit amounts, then “we would need some statutory help in the 2024 session, in order to keep everything moving along.”

–Kristine de Leon; kdeleon@oregonian.com