Not long ago, employers were competing over who could be most generous in providing family-friendly benefits — things like paid parental leave, subsidized fertility treatments and even pet insurance. Paid leave was expanded to people who hadn’t gotten it before, like fathers and hourly workers.
Now, some companies are reconsidering.
The share of U.S. employers offering paid family leave dropped two percentage points in 2025, to 31 percent, according to an annual survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.
At least two large companies, Deloitte and Zoom, recently said they were cutting back the level of family leave they offered. At Deloitte, the cuts apply to people in certain administrative roles, and it is also reducing vacation time and eliminating financial support for adoption, surrogacy and I.V.F. for those employees.
The move could particularly affect female workers, analysts said, because paid family leave has been shown to help them stay employed.
Because Deloitte’s cuts are for support staff, as opposed to accountants and consultants, they also target jobs that generally pay less and that are predominantly done by women, noted Joan Williams, founding director of the Equality Action Center at U.C. Law San Francisco.
Although cutbacks to family leave don’t seem to be widespread, it’s part of a larger trend of scaling back from what one human resources publication called the golden age of benefits, at least at certain employers. Cuts have included nice-to-have perks, like laundry or snacks, and policies that helped caregivers juggle family demands and work, like remote work.
One reason it’s happening is that there’s less competition for workers as the job market weakens. Part of the boom in family benefits in the last decade had been a result of a tight labor market.
“Talent does not have the upper hand in any segment of the economy, and companies are profit-maximizing machines and they will take advantage of that,” said Laszlo Bock, who led human resources at Google and now advises executives.
Companies have also changed the way they think about their role in workers’ lives, he said. For both cultural reasons and competitive ones, they had adopted the idea that a company was “like a family,” he said, “and extending family benefits was a natural extension of that.” After the pandemic, many employers also took steps to better accommodate people’s caregiving demands and support employee well-being.
But some companies have changed that approach more recently. Mr. Bock and others who study workplace policies said these employers were spurred on in part by the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Family benefits are part of that, they said, because parental leave has been considered an important way to recruit women, and adoption and surrogacy benefits are often used by same-sex couples.
“Absolutely there’s been a very strong movement toward, ‘We’re not going to talk about anything related to diversity or inclusion,’” Mr. Bock said.
People who have supported the rights of women in the workplace say it’s a step backward.
“It’s definitely sending a signal to female employees that if you want support for your work and family life together, don’t work here,” Professor Williams said.
Companies have cut back or discontinued remote work, diversity programs and career development for women, according to an annual report by McKinsey and Lean In, though it did not find that companies in its survey had scaled back paid leave.
Zoom cut parental leave to 18 weeks from 22 weeks for most birth mothers, and to 10 weeks from 16 weeks for other parents (still more than what most workers in the United States get). Deloitte, for certain employees, halved its paid family leave (for caring for a child, parent or spouse) to eight weeks from 16. Birth mothers can take another six to eight weeks of short-term disability.
Deloitte said in a statement that it was tailoring benefits to be more “reflective of our professionals’ broad range of skills” and to “better align with the marketplace.”
Zoom said in a statement that it updated benefits for the “long-term health and sustainability of our business” and that it was confident that its revised parental leave “remains competitive and in line with peers.”
Other major accounting firms generally offer 12 to 20 weeks of paid parental leave. Major tech companies offer 16 to 24 weeks.
Some companies are doing the opposite and expanding leave: Starbucks recently increased its paid parental leave for retail employees to 18 weeks for birth mothers and 12 weeks for other parents (the same as corporate employees get), up from six weeks for both.
“When our partners are supported, they’re better able to care for our customers,” said Betsy McManus, a Starbucks spokeswoman.
Paid leave can help companies attract and retain workers and signal that their workplaces are inclusive, said Ragan Decker, director of commercial research at the Society for Human Resource Management.
Still, there can be such a thing as too much parental leave, research has shown. More than six months can end up disadvantaging parents’ careers, and present hardships for their employers. But researchers say around six months is ideal for recovering, breastfeeding and bonding.
Most Americans get nowhere close to that. The United States is the only rich country to have no federal paid family leave (it offers 12 weeks of unpaid leave, but many workers aren’t eligible). As a result, people depend on their employers to provide it. Although the share of American workers who get paid family leave at work more than doubled in a decade, only about a quarter receive the benefit.
Claire Cain Miller is a Times reporter covering gender, families and education.
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