Parents, particularly mothers, often experience unstable employment around the time a child is born, resulting in reduced income at precisely the time that families need increased resources to provide for a new child. Employment changes around a birth can cause health insurance coverage gaps, increase likelihood of poverty, and alter the trajectory of parents’ future earnings. Poverty in early life can have detrimental effects on children’s health, development, educational achievement, and future economic wellbeing. Paid family leave has emerged as a potentially promising policy solution to reduce employment instability among working parents, smoothing income disruptions while supporting caregiving. Washington state recently implemented a generous Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) policy, which went into effect in 2020. Under PFML in Washington, parents who worked at least 820 hours in the year prior to a birth qualify for up to twelve weeks of paid leave to bond with a new child, and mothers with a serious health condition related to pregnancy can receive up to eighteen weeks of combined family and medical leave. This paper studies the effect of access to PFML in Washington on mothers’ employment status, earnings volatility, and job continuity around a birth. To estimate the policy’s causal effect, a regression discontinuity design will compare employment outcomes among mothers whose work history places them just above and below the eligibility threshold for paid family leave. Health insurance claims data on births from WA-APCD, merged to employment and paid leave program records from the Washington State Employment Security Department, will be used to estimate policy eligibility and assess employment outcomes. As several other states adopt similar policies and paid leave is debated at the federal level, this research offers important evidence on the effects of Washington’s paid family leave policy.