Minnesota’s paid leave rollout was a success. Here’s what we can learn from that.

A great thing happened on Jan. 1 this year: Minnesota launched a paid family leave program. 

Paid leave, passed by the 2023 Legislature, pays a portion of a worker’s wages when they need to take time off for an important life event like the birth or adoption of a child, recovery from a serious medical condition or help for an ailing family member. 

Paid leave fills a gap for many workers — particularly lower-wage workers — whose jobs did not come with these benefits. Now mothers and fathers can spend 12 weeks of important bonding time with a newborn, while an adult child can take 12 weeks to care for a sick parent. 

There’s another noteworthy aspect of Minnesota’s paid leave program: It launched successfully — no glitches, on time and under budget. 

You know the launch was successful because you didn’t hear much about it, which is how it goes with government: You only hear the bad news. 

While we expect — or at least hope — that every government program will have such a smooth launch, that’s often not the case.

So, it’s worth examining how and why paid leave was successful. 

I sat down with Evan Rowe, deputy commissioner of the Department of Employment and Economic Development, which manages the program, and Greg Norfleet, the director of paid leave, to discuss how they approached and ultimately executed the successful launch. 

There’s a lot to the story, but I’ll focus on three success factors. 

1. Align policy and operations

I’ve written before about the disconnect between policy and operations. The Legislature often passes laws that are vague, contradictory and nearly impossible to implement. For a complex program like paid leave, it is critical that the policies included in the authorizing legislation can be easily operationalized. 

The bill for paid leave was 81 pages long, dense with details. 

It would be far more functional to have the Legislature set high-level policy and let agencies work out operational details in rules. But in Minnesota, detailed legislation is often used as the work-around to avoid the burden of rule-making because rules (i.e., regulations) require an onerous and time-consuming development process. 

In this case, DEED worked closely with the bill authors, Sen. Alice Mann, DFL-Edina, and then-Rep. Ruth Richardson, DFL-Mendota Heights, to get the right details in the bill. Mann and Richardson were supportive and responsive to DEED’s requests, a prerequisite for success. 

The Legislature also supported DEED’s requests for substantial money to support implementation of paid leave — and a two-and-a-half-year implementation timeline.

Because of the cooperation and partnership between DEED and the bill authors, DEED had the detailed legal framework, the time and the funding needed for success. 

2. Focus on customers

Once the legislation passed, DEED moved quickly. Norfleet, the paid leave director, was hired in August 2023, just a couple of months after the bill passed. He brought direct experience, having served as the deputy director of the Massachusetts paid leave program, which launched in 2021. 

Norfleet and his team started by identifying the main stakeholders for paid leave: applicants (workers); employers; and health care providers (who submit the medical documentation needed to verify eligibility for medical leave). 

DEED recognized from the outset the need to engage with these partners early and often. Norfleet said the team started by planning three trips around the state to meet with employers. The engagement never stopped, and by the launch, they had conducted 340 meetings. 

They focused on providing simple and efficient processes for applicants, employers and health care providers, including an employer portal and an app that allows health care providers to directly submit medical documentation to the state. 

DEED used a new strategy to organize the paid leave project. Rather than creating thousands of detailed project requirements upfront — a standard practice in IT for decades — they focused on a set of milestones, or in their words, “problems to solve.” Staff teams worked to solve the problems, with a focus on iterative and continuous improvement. 

This strategy has a name in IT jargon: the product approach. It is a departure from “project management,” the approach that has been used for large IT systems for decades. These large projects often get bogged down, missing deadlines and overspending budgets.

MNIT — Minnesota’s IT agency — and the state’s Technology Advisory Committee have been promoting greater use of the product approach for large projects, in part from lessons learned from failed projects like the vehicle registration and drivers’ license program MNLARS and the first iteration of the state’s health insurance marketplace MNsure.

The success of Minnesota paid leave provides a model for all state agencies.

3. Build on strengths

Finally, DEED made use of existing technology and business processes wherever possible. 

They used the MNIT’s ID proofing tool for paid leave applicant login, security and fraud prevention. This is a step toward a common public login for all state services. 

DEED also leveraged the IT systems that administer unemployment insurance, which is also run by DEED. Paid leave and UI are operationally similar programs. Leveraging UI simplified the process of implementing paid leave and eased the impact on employers, who already use the UI systems. 

Leveraging existing IT systems takes planning and foresight, including in the policy process. For example, the paid leave bill has a detailed definition of “wages.” It is the same definition of wages used for UI, avoiding the need to collect new wage information from employers and recode the system. 

The mirroring of UI went beyond IT systems, as the DEED paid leave team leaned heavily on the DEED UI division staff, learning and applying ideas for staffing and business processes. 

In other words: DEED avoided reinventing the wheel. 

All this paid off. On Jan. 1, 2026, Minnesota launched paid leave, on schedule, and $70 million under budget. 

I tend to look for systemic reasons why government administration works rather than jumping to credit — or blame — individuals. 

But the DEED team deserves credit. They made smart decisions and executed them well.

But that doesn’t mean they did it alone. 

Credit should also go to the legislators who supported agency operational needs, to the stakeholders who invested time to improve the customer experience, to partner agencies like MNIT — and to state leaders who studied past failures and adopted more effective operational strategies. 

Minnesota’s paid leave program also had a couple of built-in advantages. A dozen or so states already have paid leave programs, allowing DEED to learn from their experiences. Paid leave is also a fully state-designed program, free from federal requirements that often complicate program design and operations. 

State government should celebrate and learn from the lessons of paid leave. 

Success in government is often overlooked, while failure is under a microscope. 

Success is kind of boring, which is why news crews aren’t out at the airport reporting on the modern miracle of airplanes landing safely one after another. 

But when it comes to the operations of government, I can assure you boring is just fine for government leaders — and the public they serve.