Tennessee Military Leave for State Employees

Section 8-33-109 gives a state employee who is a member of a reserve component of the armed forces, including the Tennessee National Guard, paid leave of absence not exceeding twenty working days in any one calendar year for duty or training performed under competent orders, for either the state or the United States. The twenty days are working days rather than calendar days, which matters: a two-week annual training period consumes ten of them rather than fourteen. Public Chapter 243 of 2025 added a definition to 8-33-101: a "working day" means "the number of hours an employee is scheduled to work in a twenty-four-hour period". The allowance is therefore twenty of the employee's own scheduled days measured in hours, so a firefighter or corrections officer on long shifts is credited by the hours of each scheduled shift rather than by a standard eight-hour day, and a day off in the schedule costs nothing. Active state duty is additional. The twenty days come "plus such additional days as may result from any call to active state duty pursuant to 58-1-106." A Guard member activated by the Governor for a flood, a tornado response or a civil emergency is not spending the twenty-day allowance on it. That is a meaningful difference from the states in this catalog that fold state duty into a single annual cap. Three protections ride along and they are the part most often left out of a summary. Military leave does not reduce regular vacation time. It does not reduce sick leave. And it does not affect a performance rating, which closes off the manager who marks an employee down for absence that the statute compelled. There is no length-of-service requirement. A state employee in the first month of employment has the same twenty days as one in the twentieth year. Once the twenty days are exhausted, the employee is not simply unpaid. The Department of Human Resources' Attendance and Leave Manual: "After 20 paid workdays, employees may use up to 5 sick days instead of annual leave to avoid unpaid leave." Under 58-1-121, an employee "ordered to or retained on active duty during a contingency operation" is entitled to special leave with partial pay for up to a year, equal to "the difference between the employee's State salary and their active-duty pay"; the partial pay is taxable and does not count toward retirement, life insurance or severance. A Civil Air Patrol member gets up to fifteen paid workdays a year (42-7-102). The manual also gives a veteran (honorably discharged after at least six months of service in a period of war or a presidentially declared mobilization) up to four hours of excused absence a day to serve as a pallbearer, in a firing squad or in an honor guard at a military funeral, while a member on funeral honors duty under 10 U.S.C. 12503 or 32 U.S.C. 115 uses military leave without that cap; and a veteran employee with a thirty percent or greater service-connected disability has thirty-six hours of leave a year, not carried over, for appointments related to it. Federal FMLA military caregiver leave, up to twenty-six weeks of unpaid job-protected leave in a twelve-month period, applies to state employees as to other covered employers. None of this is USERRA and none of it displaces USERRA. The federal reemployment rights, the five-year cumulative service limit, the health coverage continuation and the escalator principle apply to state employment as they do to private employment. Section 8-33-109 is paid leave on top of unpaid federal protection.