Modern HR teams are flooded with leave requests. So why aren’t many of them equipped with the tools they need to stay compliant?
According to our 2026 State of Leave and Accommodations report, 53% of organizations saw increased leave requests in 2025. Of those, two-thirds reported an uptick of 20% or more.
These data points illustrate just how busy HR is. But they also help paint a bigger picture. For the last three consecutive years, the majority of our survey respondents have told us that they’ve seen an uptick in leave requests. This increase has a compounding effect on HR’s workload. Many HR teams now handle twice as many cases as they did just three years ago.
As HR’s workload has increased, however, their tools haven’t been upgraded accordingly. Many teams report using manual processes, like spreadsheets and email chains, to manage leave. These tools can’t keep up as requests for support scale.
HR management needs purpose-built technology to transform its approach to leave management. In this article, we’ll explore why leave of absence management software is essential, the core features you should look for, and how to position your tools to reap the greatest ROI possible.
Defining the Modern Leave Landscape
In our survey, HR leaders said that complying with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was their biggest challenge. But it’s far from their only challenge. As leave managers work to comply with the FMLA and other longstanding statutes, they’re also confronting a spate of state and local leave laws.
In 2025, for example, New York City, Illinois, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Rhode Island enacted or updated leave-related legislation. These laws go beyond providing basic job protection; they provide coverage ranging from prenatal leave to organ donation leave. Legislators have no plans to slow down on leave legislation. 2026 brings new leave laws in places like Colorado, Washington, Delaware, and Minnesota.
With legislation providing a wide variety of leave coverage, it’s no surprise that employees’ leave usage is similarly varied. The top five reasons employees took leave in 2025 include:
- To recover from their own illness or injuries: 51%
- The death of a loved one or family member (bereavement leave): 44%
- To bond with a new child (parental leaves): 36%
- To care for a sick or injured child: 35%
- To manage pregnancy-related issues and conditions: 35%
As employees use more types of leave for more diverse reasons, HR needs sophisticated tools to keep up with requests for support. But 41% of teams report that they’re still taking a manual approach to leave management, even amid a growing number of state leave laws and legal obligations.
These practitioners are using spreadsheets, email, and DIY reminders for managing leaves of absence. It’s an approach that’s deeply inefficient and frustrating for those executing it, but it can also lead to serious compliance mistakes and a downgraded employee experience.
Struggling to keep up? You’re not alone. AbsenceSoft’s Compliance Engine (ACE) tracks major statutes like the FMLA and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), in addition to more than 200 state and local leave laws, ensuring your team stays up to date and compliant. ACE not only provides instant, accurate eligibility determinations, but also keeps the leave management process moving with automated workflows, communication templates, and our automated packet generator.
Why the Right Platform is Essential for Leave Management Today
Software provides the foundation for managing leaves of absence in today’s complex environment. It is the most important element of an organization’s approach to leave management, as it enables compliance, efficiency, and the employee experience. Here’s how:
- Enhancing compliance: 41% of HR leaders cite FMLA compliance as a top leave management challenge. But the FMLA is far from their only worry, as state and local leave laws multiply. Software ensures compliance with the ever-evolving patchwork of requirements, keeping HR teams up to date and on track.
- Elevating the employee experience: According to our 2025 report, 40% of employees considered quitting after poor leave experience. When HR uses a leave of absence management software, they provide a fast and consistent experience for employees. With their workload more manageable, they can also provide a more personalized experience, giving employees the support they need.
- Enabling volume: Some HR teams are dealing with a 120% increase in cases over the last three years. Manual processes will not make way for this kind of volume. With software, however, managing leaves of absence at scale is not just possible, but more doable than ever before.
- Leveraging intelligent automation: Leave managers aren’t hesitating to use AI in the leave management process. Forty-five percent of our respondents said they use tools like ChatGPT for leave, but those resources come with guardrails, privacy, and assurances for accuracy. That’s why it’s essential to implement leave management software that leverages AI in a compliant, risk-averse way.
Software is a critical component of modern leave management. With AbsenceSoft, HR teams get a platform that was built specifically for leave management, with intelligent automation powering every step.
Core Features of Modern Leave Management Software
As leave management gets more complicated, the market is producing more solutions for HR teams to consider. Your team will need to carefully evaluate potential partners. Here are a few features to look for:
Automated Eligibility Calculation
Calculating leave eligibility is difficult at any organization. As legislators continually update existing leave laws and add new ones, manual eligibility calculation is a hopeless task.
Large, complex employers in industries like higher education and healthcare face an especially difficult challenge when it comes to calculations. When leave managers must consider multiple calendars, locations, shifts, and job codes, eligibility is best left to software.
Platforms like AbsenceSoft’s Compliance Engine provide real-time calculations across company policies and more than 200 state and federal laws. This allows HR to make eligibility decisions quickly and accurately, accounting for multiple nuances at once.
Self-Service Intake
Employees may not know how to request a leave of absence. That’s why so many, about 44%, still request leave from managers. Leave platforms that offer a mobile-friendly employee portal make requesting a leave of absence easy and discreet. AbsenceSoft’s platform provides a self-service portal that that guarantees employees submit all of the necessary information for their leave of absence.
Automated Workflows
Modern leave management software should eliminate manual processes wherever possible while supporting various types of leaves and promoting work-life balance for employees. With intelligent approval workflows, leave managers can automate routing based on leave type, duration, and organizational hierarchy. AbsenceSoft’s automated notifications keep processes rolling by sending alerts to employees, managers, and HR. What’s more, HR teams can create custom workflows with AbsenceSoft’s workflow builder.
Integrated Communications
Leave managers can create, personalize, and dispatch leave communications in seconds with a modern leave platform. Platforms like AbsenceSoft can also automatically generate forms and communications as part of a leave management workflows. This way employees will receive personalized documents with all the information they need, as soon as they need it. AbsenceSoft enables multiple forms of communications, including mail, email, text messaging, and fax barcoding.
Return-to-Work Coordination
The leave management process doesn’t end with approving a worker’s time away. Leave teams must also track leave and prepare for an employee’s return to work, including certifying their fitness for duty, selecting a date for their return, sorting out any possible accommodations, and preparing their team for their arrival. Leave tools facilitate that process by creating an easy-to-follow timeline, automatically notifying managers and IT, providing managers with the visibility and control to confirm return to work dates, and aligning logistics. By integrating leave and accommodations management, the AbsenceSoft system ensures workers returning from leave get the accommodations they need.
Choosing Leave Management Software: Key Considerations
Many teams are considering investing more resources in leave management. In fact, 60% of respondents in our recent survey said they plan to upgrade tools, add headcount, or improve internal leave processes in 2026.
If your team is among those planning to add or enhance its leave tools, it’s critical to choose the right leave management software. Below, we provide a checklist of key considerations.
- Compliance coverage: Does the tool in question track the state and local laws you need to consider? Does it provide automatic eligibility calculations? The AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine comes with more than 200 statutory policies that include military and exigency leave, safety and domestic violence leave, bone marrow and organ donation leave, school activity leave, and much more.
- Integration capabilities: 22% of HR leaders we surveyed report using dedicated software for leave management. It’s crucial that these platforms integrate well with other HR tools. AbsenceSoft integrates seamlessly with your team’s HRIS, HCM, time and attendance systems, payroll platforms, and more.
- AI with guardrails: Many HR practitioners admit that they’re using tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for critical leave tasks like eligibility decisions. This can expose your organization to serious risk because they aren’t purpose-built or connect to a secure platorm. That’s why it is important to leverage a platform that includes AI with guardrails. AbsenceSoft uses intelligent automation to eliminate busywork, increase consistency, and improve compliance. But we build in human oversight, too.
- Unified platform: Look for a platform where you can manage leave and accommodations in one system. The two areas are profoundly intertwined. AbsenceSoft provides one platform where you can centralize all of your leave and accommodations processes.
Implementation Best Practices
At AbsenceSoft, our team has over a decade of successful software implementations across some of the most complex workforces and industries. We know that high-quality implementation lays the foundation for managing leaves of absence successfully.
Any good implementation includes manager training. Many teams — 42%, in fact — struggle with the consequences of untrained managers. But when managers are trained to use a software that simplifies and optimizes the leave management process, they don’t pose as great a threat. Managers can simply direct employees to the platform where they can submit their leave requests, track their case, and plan their return to work.
Change management is another critical element of implementation. Employees need to understand that a new process is being introduced and how it impacts them. Offer multiple training sessions in several different formats to ensure employees get the information they need. You can also provide visual guidance in key communication channels like the employee intranet, team messaging platforms, and more.
As you work through implementation, lean on your vendor. At AbsenceSoft, we view implementation as a true partnership. Our support extends beyond the initial implementation phase. We provide quarterly check-ins, and we update your software as laws change and your policies shift.
The ROI of Leave Management Software
When an employer adopts leave management software, they can expect to see a multidimensional return on investment. This includes yields like:
- Time savings: With manual leave management methods, the average case count per case manager is 36. But with dedicated leave software, that number grows to 59, according to our report. We’ve seen this play out at countless organizations, including one national healthcare provider that increased its caseload by 174% when it switched to AbsenceSoft.
- Compliance risk reduction: Technology greatly reduces compliance risk by standardizing processes, automating timelines, centralizing documentation, and templating communications. With tools like ACE, HR doesn’t have to rely on their own memory (or ChatGPT) to know who’s eligible for what. Our systems account for major federal laws and more than 200 statutory policies, eliminating any and all guesswork from your workflow.
- Employee retention impact: A poor leave experience lead many employees to quit and others to warn potential talent from joining the company. When an organization optimizes its leave program, it doesn’t just offer leave efficiently and compliantly. It offers genuine, human support to employees when they need it most.
- Cost coordination with state benefits: Pay mistakes are one of the top-cited frustrations for employees taking leave. With AbsenceSoft’s Payroll Calculations, HR and payroll teams can automatically estimate leave payments, coordinate state benefits, and export everything from one centralized platform.
Transform Your Approach to Leave Management with AbsenceSoft
Our data reveals a serious conundrum for modern HR teams. Leave requests are up and continuing to grow, but the manual processes so many teams rely on can’t keep up. It follows that 60% of teams plan to invest more in leave management. Will yours be one of them?
For many teams, this investment must include technology. Technology isn’t an optional tool anymore. It’s the mechanism that will enable HR’s success as the leave landscape grows more complex.
See how the AbsenceSoft platform can transform leave management from an unbearable burden to a significant strategic advantage. Schedule a demo with a CLMS-certified specialist today.