This article quotes two sources. The sick leave passages come from the State of New York's program page for paid sick leave at ny.gov, retrieved on September 17, 2026; it is the state's own description of the program, not the statute, and the state revises it. The accommodation passages come from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship under the ADA, retrieved from eeoc.gov the same morning; enforcement guidance is the Commission's explanation of how it reads the statute, it is not the statute, and courts are not bound by it. How any of this applies to your employer, your hours and your situation is a question this article cannot answer. For a question about your own sick leave, the New York State Department of Labor; for an accommodation question, an employment lawyer, and for free technical help on accommodations the Job Accommodation Network at askjan.org. Innovative Placements is a connector — we help people with disabilities find work in Western New York — and we are not lawyers.
You have been out for treatment twice this month and there is a third appointment coming. You mention it to your supervisor, and the first thing they say is: use your sick time. That is not a brush-off. It is, in most cases, exactly what the guidance below says an employer should point to first. But it is also the moment two very different kinds of leave get talked about as if they were one thing, and they are not.
One of them you already have. The other you have to ask for. This article is about what each one requires, what each one protects, and why knowing where the first one ends tells you when the conversation about the second has to begin.
The Leave You Already Have
New York's paid sick leave program is not something you apply for and not something tied to a disability. As the state describes it:
“New York's paid sick leave law requires employers with five or more employees or net income of more than $1 million to provide paid sick leave to employees and for employers with fewer than five employees and a net income of $1 million or less to provide unpaid sick leave to employees.”
“All private-sector employees in New York State are covered, regardless of industry, occupation, part-time status, and overtime exempt status.”
Two things in that are easy to read past. The first is all private-sector employees: part-time counts, and so does a job that is exempt from overtime. The second is that the smallest employers still have to provide the leave; for some of them it is unpaid rather than paid, but it exists.
It accrues as you work, and it can be used for more than being sick yourself:
“Employees begin accruing leave on September 30, 2020. Leave must be accrued at rate not less than one hour for every thirty hours worked.”
“Employees may use accrued leave for ‘sick’ or ‘safe’ reasons impacting the employee or a member of their family for whom they are providing care.”
How much you can accrue in a year has a ceiling, and the ceiling depends on the size of your employer. The state lists four tiers:
100 or more employees: “Employers with 100 or more employees must provide up to 56 hours of paid sick leave per calendar year.”
5 to 99 employees: “Employers with 5-99 employees must provide up to 40 hours of paid sick leave per calendar year.”
0 to 4 employees: “If net income is $1 million or less, employer must provide up to 40 hours of unpaid sick leave. If net income is greater than $1 million, employer must provide up to 40 hours of paid sick leave.”
Notice what this article is not going to tell you: how many hours you have. Which row is yours depends on your employer's size and, for the smallest employers, its net income; how much is actually in your bank depends on how many hours you have worked at the rate above, and on how much you have already used this year. Those numbers are on your pay stub or with your employer, not here. The word to hold onto is ceiling: whatever your row, there is a point at which this leave runs out.
The Leave You Ask For
Leave as a reasonable accommodation has a different source entirely. It is not accrued and it is not automatic. It is requested, because of a disability, and the Commission's guidance is explicit that it counts:
“Permitting the use of accrued paid leave, or unpaid leave, is a form of reasonable accommodation when necessitated by an employee's disability.”
Three words in that sentence do the work. Necessitated: the leave has to be needed because of the disability. Accommodation: it is requested, which means the request has to be connected to a medical reason, and how that connection is made in plain language is the subject of asking for a schedule change. And or unpaid: this leave does not have to be paid to be an accommodation, which is the hinge the next section turns on.
The Order, and Why It Matters
Here is where the two kinds of leave meet, and the guidance is unusually direct about which comes first:
“An employer does not have to provide paid leave beyond that which is provided to similarly-situated employees. Employers should allow an employee with a disability to exhaust accrued paid leave first and then provide unpaid leave.”
“For example, if employees get 10 days of paid leave, and an employee with a disability needs 15 days of leave, the employer should allow the individual to use 10 days of paid leave and 5 days of unpaid leave.”
So when your supervisor says use your sick time, they are, on the Commission's reading, describing the expected sequence: the paid leave you accrued by statute gets used first, and the accommodation is what provides leave beyond it. Accommodation leave does not have to add paid days to what everyone else gets. What it does is keep the leave going, unpaid, past the point where the accrued leave stops.
Which is why the ceiling matters. If you know your row and you know roughly how much is in your bank, you know roughly when the leave you already have will run out — and that is the point by which the accommodation conversation needs to have started, not the point at which to start it. A request made after the last accrued hour is gone is still a valid request; the guidance says a request can be made at any time. But an employer that first hears the words medical reason on the day the sick time ends is being asked to run an interactive process under a deadline that did not have to exist.
Sick leave needs no reason beyond the state's sick or safe ones, and it does not require you to tell anyone about a disability. Accommodation leave requires the request to be connected to a medical reason, and in return it brings protections sick leave does not carry, described in the next section. That is a description of what each requires and what each protects. It is not a reason to use one in order to avoid the other. Using sick leave to keep a disability out of the conversation is a choice some people make, and it means the protections below are not in play while they make it.
What Accommodation Leave Protects That Sick Leave Does Not
Three passages, all from the same section of the guidance, each answering a question people actually ask.
What if my employer has a rule that fires people after a set amount of leave?
“May an employer apply a ‘no-fault’ leave policy, under which employees are automatically terminated after they have been on leave for a certain period of time, to an employee with a disability who needs leave beyond the set period? No. If an employee with a disability needs additional unpaid leave as a reasonable accommodation, the employer must modify its ‘no-fault’ leave policy to provide the employee with the additional leave, unless it can show that: (1) there is another effective accommodation that would enable the person to perform the essential functions of his/her position, or (2) granting additional leave would cause an undue hardship.”
Will my job still be there?
“Does an employer have to hold open an employee's job as a reasonable accommodation? Yes. An employee with a disability who is granted leave as a reasonable accommodation is entitled to return to his/her same position unless the employer demonstrates that holding open the position would impose an undue hardship.”
The guidance goes on to say that where holding the position open for the whole leave would be an undue hardship, the employer must consider whether it has a vacant, equivalent position the employee is qualified for, to be reassigned to and returned to at the end of the leave. Its own example is an employee who needs eight months of leave: the employer grants it, decides after four months that it cannot hold the position for the remaining four, and must then look for an equivalent vacancy, and failing that a vacant position at a lower level.
Can the time I was out be held against me?
“Can an employer penalize an employee for work missed during leave taken as a reasonable accommodation? No. To do so would be retaliation for the employee's use of a reasonable accommodation to which s/he is entitled under the law.”
Read those three together and the shape of the trade is clear. Statutory sick leave asks nothing of you and, past its ceiling, promises nothing. Accommodation leave asks for a request connected to a medical reason and, in return, is the leave the no-fault policy has to bend for, the leave the position is held open through, and the leave you cannot be penalized for taking — each with the same limit, which is undue hardship, and each subject to how the Commission's reading fares in front of a court.
New York also has short-term disability benefits and paid family leave, and federal law has the Family and Medical Leave Act. Each is a separate program with its own eligibility, its own paperwork and its own rules about pay and job protection, and none of them is what the sections above describe. The FMLA guide and the DBL article cover two of them on their own terms. If your situation touches more than one of these at once, which is common, that is precisely the moment for a lawyer or a benefits specialist rather than a blog.
The Honest Summary
Claiming: that every private-sector employee in New York accrues sick leave with a ceiling set by employer size, as the state describes it; that leave as a reasonable accommodation is a different thing that has to be requested; that the Commission's guidance expects accrued paid leave to be used first and accommodation leave to continue beyond it, unpaid; and that accommodation leave carries protections, each limited by undue hardship, that sick leave does not.
Not claiming: how many hours you have, whether your employer falls in any particular row, whether any leave you have taken or asked for was or was not an accommodation, or what will happen if you ask. The state's page is the state's description and the Commission's guidance is the Commission's reading; neither is the statute, and the reading of your situation belongs to a lawyer who has heard all of it.
Where to Take It
If the next step is the request itself, asking for a schedule change is about how a request for accommodation is actually made, in plain words and without a form, and why the clause that connects it to a medical reason is the one that matters. If you already have an arrangement and it has stopped covering what you need, that is a different conversation with a different opening, and it is in reopening the conversation. And if the leave has run its course and what you are looking at now is a return, the employer's side of that is in job restructuring.
The sick leave quotations are from the State of New York's program page, ny.gov/programs/new-york-paid-sick-leave, retrieved on September 17, 2026; the Department of Labor's own address for the program redirects to it. The accommodation quotations are from the EEOC's Enforcement Guidance on Reasonable Accommodation and Undue Hardship under the ADA, its section on leave, retrieved from eeoc.gov on September 17, 2026; the page carries the Commission's notice about the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Neither source is the statute, both are revised, and if this article ever disagrees with the current published text of either, trust the current text and tell us.