DOL FAB No. 2023-1 Compliance Tester
Total active employees working in the United States in a rolling 20-week period.
The DOL's 50/75-mile radius rules for remote workers (evaluating the work site the employee reports to or from which work is assigned) are notoriously counter-intuitive. In addition, state-level paid family leave mandates (e.g., CA, NY, WA) overwrite federal eligibility rules. Manual assessments often miss these complex overlaps, leading to wrongful denials.
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Yes. Under the FMLA, a teleworker's home is not their worksite. Instead, their legal worksite is the office they report to or from which assignments are made. If that worksite administers 50+ employees, the remote worker is covered.
For physical worksites, an employee is eligible only if 50+ employees work within 75 miles. But for remote employees, their worksite is HQ—meaning all remote staff reporting to HQ are grouped together, making them eligible company-wide.
The DOL Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2023-1 clarifies that remote employees receive FMLA protections even if they are the only employee in their state, provided the total company headcount reporting to the central hub is 50 or more.
The shift to remote work has dramatically altered the legal landscape of human resources. One of the most misunderstood areas of compliance is FMLA eligibility for work-from-home (WFH) employees. Many small business owners and HR managers believe that if an employee is the only worker in a state or lives hundreds of miles away from other team members, they are automatically excluded from the FMLA due to the "50 employees within 75 miles" location rule. In 2026, this is a dangerous assumption that can lead to costly class-action lawsuits and DOL investigations.
Under the FMLA regulations (29 CFR § 825.111(a)(2)), an employee's personal residence is never considered a corporate worksite. Instead, for a teleworking employee, the worksite is the office to which the employee reports or from which their assignments are made.
If your company has a mailing address or a centralized headquarters in San Francisco, and your 52 remote employees spread across 15 states all report to and receive their work instructions from managers at or tied to that HQ, the worksite for all 52 employees is legally San Francisco. Because 50 or more employees are employed by the company in connection with that worksite, **every single one of those remote employees is covered by the FMLA**, provided they meet the tenure (12 months) and work hour (1,250 hours) requirements.
The FMLA location rule was originally drafted to protect employers who ran small branch offices (like a single remote retail shop in Montana) where it would cause an "undue hardship" to lose an employee without local staff to cover. However, in a remote SaaS or technology company, work is decentralized. Because a remote employee's workload can be absorbed by other remote team members anywhere in the country, the physical location of the worker has no impact on coverage. Thus, the DOL has made it clear that remote workers roll up to the central assignment hub for headcount purposes.
If an HR department erroneously informs a remote employee that they are not FMLA eligible because they live alone in another state, and the employee subsequently suffers a medical emergency and is terminated, the company is highly vulnerable. Courts have consistently ruled in favor of remote employees in these circumstances, citing FMLA interference. HR teams must establish standardized remote eligibility verification procedures.
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Step-by-step leave tracking guide for U.S. small business owners.
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