February 5, 2026
Learn how to expand your bereavement policy's immediate family definition to include domestic partners, chosen family, and modern relationships.
"Immediate family" appears in nearly every bereavement policy, and nearly every policy uses it as though the meaning is obvious. Spouse, parent, child, sibling. Maybe grandparents if you're lucky.
But the bereavement leave immediate family definition in most organizations was written for a workforce that no longer exists. Families have changed. Relationships have changed. The policy language hasn't caught up, and employees are paying the price when loss hits relationships that don't fit the approved categories.
Walk through any office and pay attention to relationships, not just the ones that would qualify for leave.
One colleague was raised by her grandmother while both parents worked. Another has been with his partner for fourteen years but they never married. Someone down the hall is closer to a college friend than to any sibling. A team lead's stepmother has been in her life since age four, but there's no adoption paperwork.
Under most policies, when any of these people die, the employee gets nothing. No leave. No acknowledgment. Just an expectation to show up and perform.
Relationships commonly excluded by standard policy language:
Grief doesn't consult the policy before arriving. It shows up regardless of whether HR would approve the relationship.
Nobody designed bereavement policies to exclude people maliciously. These frameworks emerged when household structures followed more predictable patterns and legal definitions aligned more closely with emotional bonds. Spouse meant spouse. Parents were biological or adopted. The categories made sense for most people.
That alignment has broken down, and the policies haven't been updated to reflect it.
Research on this is clear, and the numbers aren't small.
A study in the Journal of Family Issues found that 87% of Americans have at least one person they consider family despite no blood or legal connection. The academic term is "fictive kin," and the average person has 7.5 such relationships. Sixty-one percent of Americans receive tangible support from them: financial help during hard times, caregiving, transportation.
This is how the majority of your workforce structures their lives. Policies built around legal and biological ties alone are operating on assumptions that don't match reality for most employees.
Marriage rates have declined steadily for decades. Cohabitation filled the space.
Pew Research found that among adults 18 to 44, more have cohabited with an unmarried partner (59%) than have ever been married (50%). For working-age adults, living with a partner without marrying is now the more common experience.
Bereavement policies haven't caught up. Most still treat the marriage certificate as the threshold for partner coverage.
Consider what this produces: an employee in a twenty-year committed relationship but no marriage gets zero bereavement days when their partner dies. A coworker who married last spring gets full leave. Does the six-month marriage represent a more significant relationship? The policy assumes it does. Anyone looking at the situation honestly would disagree.
Domestic partner bereavement leave should be standard. Legal paperwork tells you nothing about whether a relationship was central to someone's life.
Bereavement impairs cognitive function. Focus, memory, decision-making—all of it takes a hit. This occurs whether or not the lost relationship appears on an approved list.
Research published in The Transdisciplinary Journal of Management found that only 42.5% of bereaved employees felt capable of performing their job duties in the first month following a loss. Fewer than half. The study didn't distinguish between "covered" and "uncovered" relationships because grief doesn't make that distinction either.
An employee grieving a close friend of twenty years experiences the same fog as one grieving a parent. One gets time to process. The other is expected at the morning meeting.
Employees without policy coverage don't simply absorb the loss and move on. They adapt in ways that create issues:
Colleagues notice how people get treated during hard moments. When someone is denied leave because their relationship didn't fit the definitions, others draw conclusions about what would happen to them. Damage spreads beyond the one grieving employee.
Organizations worried about opening the floodgates to abuse can relax. Companies that have broadened their definitions report minimal problems. People don't fabricate grief for a few extra days off.
Some organizations eliminated relationship categories entirely. Policy now covers bereavement for "any person significant to the employee." No approved list. No verification.
The administrative cost of investigating whether relationships are legitimate would exceed any savings from catching the rare bad actor. And removing arbitrary categories communicates something important: that leadership trusts employees to understand their own lives.
For organizations that want defined boundaries, broadening the list accomplishes most of the same goal.
Worth including:
Another structure: keep categories but vary the days instead of using yes-or-no coverage.
Twenty days for spouse, partner, parent, child. Ten for siblings, grandparents, close friends. Five for extended family or other significant relationships. The specific numbers are less important than the underlying shift—recognizing more relationships even when leave duration differs.
Broader policy language requires managers who apply it consistently. Without training, some will interpret narrowly or add informal barriers that undermine the intent.
Training should clarify the manager's role: confirm eligibility and offer support. Not interrogate whether the relationship was significant enough. Not require employees to justify their grief. Edge cases go to HR. Managers shouldn't be positioned as gatekeepers evaluating whose loss deserves recognition.
Skip documentation requirements too. Asking for death certificates or proof of relationship during an already brutal time signals suspicion. It costs more to administer than it saves, and employees remember being asked to prove their grief was legitimate.
Bereavement leave immediate family definitions are policy choices. They can be rewritten.
Expanding coverage costs little because most employees never invoke the broader categories, and those who do take only what they need. What changes is the message about whose relationships count and whose grief matters.
Employees remember how organizations treated them when someone they loved died. That memory shapes loyalty and engagement for years afterward. A policy that covers a coworker's six-month marriage but not your fifteen-year partnership says something about values. An inclusive bereavement policy says something different.
Pull your current policy. Read the relationship definitions out loud. Compare them against the lives of people in your organization.
The gap is probably wider than anyone has looked at closely. Closing it isn't complicated.
Most HR teams know their bereavement policy needs updating but stall on what the new language should say. Bereave provides policy templates and sample language drawn from companies that have already expanded their definitions, including examples from organizations offering 20+ days of leave, covering domestic partners and chosen family, and allowing flexible non-consecutive time off. Instead of drafting from scratch and guessing what works, teams can review what progressive employers have implemented and adapt language that fits their culture.
Policy language is only part of the challenge. Bereave also equips managers with training on how to respond when employees experience loss, so conversations don't default to awkwardness or avoidance. Grieving employees and their families get access to checklists, resources for navigating estate and financial matters, and human support for the moments when decisions feel impossible to make alone. The platform treats the aftermath of loss as something that requires structure, not just sympathy.
Expanding bereavement definitions to include domestic partners, chosen family, and other significant relationships signals that an organization takes grief seriously. Bereave helps make sure the support behind that signal is real, not just a policy update that sits in a handbook unread.
No federal definition exists. Employers set their own, and state laws with bereavement provisions vary in how they define coverage. Organizations have wide latitude to be more inclusive than any legal minimum.
Yes. Cohabitation is more common than marriage among working-age adults. Excluding domestic partners means excluding primary relationships for a large portion of your workforce. A progressive bereavement policy treats partnerships as significant regardless of whether a marriage license exists.
Approaches vary. Some use open-ended language: "any person significant to the employee." Others list specific categories like close friends, mentors, and household members. Both approaches acknowledge that meaningful relationships extend beyond blood and legal ties, which is the point.
Organizations with expanded definitions consistently report this isn't a real problem. People don't invent grief for time off. Administrative costs of policing eligibility exceed any theoretical savings, and trust-based policies create better experiences without meaningful downside.
See how Bereave helps teams respond with clarity, consistency, and care.
Help bring Bereave to your workplace. Your co-workers will thank you.
