How long is a doctor's note good for?
A note covers the dates on it. How long ago it was signed does not change where that range ends.
The short answer: dates, not a shelf life
A doctor's note doesn't have a shelf life. It has a date range — the dates the provider wrote on it, start through end. Outside those dates, it documents nothing, no matter how recently it was signed.
Two different questions get asked as one here. What the note covers is just the dates on it. When your employer can ask you for a new one is a separate question, with its own rules.
WHAT THE NOTE ACTUALLY COVERS
What sets the dates, and why there's no expiry stamp
The provider's evaluation sets the date range, not the day the note gets signed. Whatever was evaluated becomes the days the note speaks to — nothing before it, nothing after.
A note signed today for dates already behind you still only documents those earlier dates. Signing doesn't reset what's inside the range, and it doesn't stretch what's outside it.
When your employer can ask for a new one
Outside FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act), two things can set this. Your employer's own attendance policy is one. The other is a state or city paid sick-leave law, where one covers you: several limit what an employer may demand and how often it may ask. This page knows neither your policy nor your local law, and does not guess at either.
Inside FMLA, the timing is set by federal regulation instead, but only if the leave actually qualifies as FMLA leave. That takes three things at once: 12 months of employment, 1,250 hours of service in the preceding 12 months, and a worksite with 50 or more employees within 75 miles.
Miss one of the three and the clocks below never apply: your ordinary sick note runs on your employer's policy and whatever local law covers you. Meeting all three is the start, not the finish. The absence still has to be for a qualifying serious health condition, and it has to be designated as FMLA leave.
WHICH RULES SET THE TIMING
The clocks that apply once FMLA leave is involved
These are FMLA rules. They apply only where the leave involved is FMLA leave — not to an ordinary sick note.
An employer can request recertification no more often than every 30 days, and only in connection with an absence. If your certification states a minimum duration of more than 30 days, the employer must generally wait until that minimum duration passes before asking again — though in all cases, recertification can still be requested every six months in connection with an absence.
Three things let an employer ask sooner. One: you ask to extend the leave. Two: the circumstances your certification described have changed significantly, and the regulation names duration, frequency, nature and severity of the illness as examples. Three: the employer receives information that casts doubt on your stated reason for the absence, or on whether the certification still holds.
If your need for leave lasts beyond a single leave year, your employer may also require a new certification in each subsequent leave year — a reset, not a challenge to the last one. If it's the FMLA paperwork itself you need completed, that is a different document: the medical leave and FMLA forms.
If you are not better by the last covered day
The note doesn't stretch past its dates. If you're still unwell once they run out, what you need is a new evaluation covering the new days, not a request to extend the old one. Start with the provider who wrote it. If they can see you again, updating your documentation with them is faster and cheaper than starting over.
If an FMLA certification is what's actually due, federal rules give you 15 calendar days from your employer's request to submit it, and generally seven calendar days to fix it if your employer calls it incomplete or insufficient — covered in full here: Can my employer deny my doctor's note?.
A Certicare note is dated the day it is written, and it is never backdated. What it can do is certify absence dates already behind you, up to 45 days, where the provider's evaluation supports it. Where it doesn't, the note isn't written and you are refunded in full.
- For mild, self-limiting conditions
- One note covers up to 3 days, with a limit of 6 days in any 30-day window
- Completed and signed by a state-licensed provider
- Usually within about an hour of your payment, once we have everything needed
- Refunded in full any time before a clinician starts reviewing, and in full if the note can't be completed
Kept private and never sent to your employer or school without your say-so.
Coming back — when a return-to-work note is required
This one is FMLA again, not ordinary sick leave. Coming back from FMLA leave for your own serious health condition, your employer may require a fitness-for-duty certification: a statement that you can resume the job. It can only do that under a uniformly applied policy, and only if it told you so in the designation notice and gave you the list of essential functions the certification has to address. On intermittent leave it can ask up to once every 30 days, and only where it has a reasonable belief of significant risk of harm.
That is a separate document from the note that covered your absence. An FMLA fitness-for-duty certification is expected from your own treating provider, so it is not what we complete. Where a general return-to-work form is what your employer wants, that is its own product: the return-to-work form.
If the dates on your note are wrong
If the dates on your note don't match what actually happened, ask the provider who wrote it to correct or reissue it — that's the fix, not asking for extra days added on top of the old ones.
Where we wrote the note, the correction is included and you do not pay again.