WA Cares: Start collecting premiums July 1

Find the resources you need to collect premiums in July for Q3

Employers begin deducting premiums from employees’ wages for the WA Cares Fund on July 1, 2023. WA Cares is the state’s new long-term care insurance program, funded entirely by worker contributions. There isn’t an employer premium for WA Cares.

At the beginning of the third quarter, you will collect WA Cares premiums from your employees much like you do now for Paid Leave — we’ve updated the Paid Leave reporting system on our end so you can report for both programs at the same time.

Employers who don’t deduct premiums when they should will have to pay

Make sure to deduct premiums from contributing employees starting July 1. A contributing employee is someone who hasn’t given their employer an exemption letter.

Employers can’t retroactively deduct premiums. Any employers who don’t deduct premiums from contributing employees will have to pay the premiums themselves during quarterly reporting.

Calculating premiums

Calculate the total premium amount for each of your employees. The premium is 0.58% of an employee’s gross wages, so:

• Gross wages x .0058 = total premium for employee

Note that unlike Paid Leave, premium contributions are not capped at the taxable maximum for Social Security. Need help determining premium amounts for WA Cares and Paid Leave? Check out the premium calculator.

Worker information

We’ve made it easy to communicate WA Cares updates with your staff. Our employer toolkit’s monthly content for June includes a paycheck insert you can include with your workers’ pay stubs and a pre-written staff email article about WA Cares benefits, contributions, and exemptions.

Exemptions

If you have employees who may qualify and would like to be exempted from WA Cares, encourage them to submit their application to ESD as soon as possible. ESD previously committed to processing all WA Cares Fund exemption applications submitted on or before June 1, 2023, before premiums take effect in July.

ESD will continue to process applications received after June 1 as quickly as possible in the order we receive them. Exemption applications approved on or after July 1 will not take effect until Oct. 1, 2023.

Once ESD processes an application, we send a confirmation email to the customer. If an applicant would like an update on the status of their application, we suggest they log into their SAW account. We ask that they avoid calling our customer care team to ask about status. Our agents cannot quote processing timelines for individual applications.

WA Cares and Paid Leave: Employer webinar

Live webinar: self-employed elective coverage

Are you looking for in-depth conversations around self-employed elective coverage for WA Cares and Paid Leave? Join us for an elective coverage focused webinar, where we will cover specific topics in depth. Topics will include an elective coverage overview, requirements for self-employed individuals and business types and more!

• Thursday, June 15, 11 a.m. to noon — Register now
  This webinar is limited to 200 participants, so don’t delay in registering!

More to come!

We will be hosting employer webinar opportunities throughout the year so be sure to stay up to date with our employer newsletter for upcoming dates and topics.