Since May 1, 2026, a Maine worker has been able to draw paid family and medical leave benefits for up to 12 weeks away from the job. Payroll contributions for that program started back in January 2025.
If you run a Maine company with nine employees and no HR department, that’s one of several rules you’re already expected to have written into a policy.
That gap is what this page is about.
What Mineral is
Mineral is an HR compliance platform we provide to our employer benefit clients. It’s contracted through Gain Financial Services, Inc., the parent company of Maine Health Insurance Brokers.
We name it openly because you’ll be logging into it yourself, and you should know whose tool it is and who is standing behind it.
The three things it gives you
A handbook builder and a policy library. You answer questions about your company and it assembles a handbook from the policies that apply to you. The library holds the underlying policy language, so later you can update one policy without rewriting the whole document.
Live HR advisors. You can ask real HR professionals real questions, the kind you’d otherwise ask a friend who used to work in HR. [VERIFY: Mineral feature detail, how advisors are reached and what hours they’re available]
Compliance alerts. When an employment law changes, you’re notified, along with what the change means for your handbook and your policies.
What a Maine handbook has to account for
A handbook written from a national template will miss things here. Two Maine laws in particular need their own language.
Maine earned paid leave, 26 M.R.S. section 637. If you have more than 10 employees who work more than 120 days a year, you owe one hour of paid leave for every 40 hours an employee works, capped at 40 hours a year. Seasonal industries are excluded. Your handbook needs to say how the leave accrues, how an employee requests it, and how it interacts with any vacation or sick time you already offer.
Maine Paid Family and Medical Leave. Payroll contributions began in January 2025, and benefits became payable to eligible workers on May 1, 2026, for up to 12 weeks. If you have 15 or more employees, you contribute 1 percent of wages and may deduct up to half of that from employees. If you have fewer than 15, you contribute 0.5 percent and may deduct all of it from employees. Employers who qualify may substitute a private plan. Your handbook needs the contribution and deduction language, the request process, and how this leave sits next to your other leave policies.
Add to those the ordinary pieces every handbook carries, like pay practices, overtime classification, harassment reporting and discipline, plus the eligibility rules and waiting period on the benefit plan itself once you offer one.
Why a small Maine employer is the one most exposed
The rules don’t scale down the way owners expect them to.
Maine Paid Family and Medical Leave applies to employers of every size. There’s no small business exemption, only a different contribution rate. And the earned paid leave threshold sits just above 10 employees, so a company that hires its eleventh person walks into a new obligation without anyone mailing a notice about it.
A 40 person company has somebody whose job is to catch that. A nine person company has an owner who catches it on a Sunday night, or doesn’t catch it at all.
The value of an alert and a handbook update is that you find out about a rate change or a new notice requirement from the platform, rather than from a complaint or an audit (or a lawsuit).
Straight talk with you about what this is
We don’t sell it as a standalone product. This is included for our employer benefit clients and it comes standard for all our clients, at no cost. If you’re already an employer client and are not yet set up on the Mineral platform, ask your broker and we’ll get your account set up right away.