Connecticut has no headcount small enough to be exempt.
Connecticut runs a two-tier rule and there is no bottom tier that lets you out. At three or more employees you must train everyone. Below three, you must still train every supervisory employee, two hours each. And unlike most states, failing to train is not merely evidence of a problem. It is itself defined as a discriminatory practice.
Two tiers, and neither one is an exemption.
Connecticut is the only state on this list where the rule was deliberately written to keep reaching downward.
Under fifteen people is not the same as exempt.
At three or more employees, every employee gets two hours of training within six months of hire. Below three employees, the obligation does not disappear. It narrows to supervisory employees, who still get the same two hours, within six months of taking on the supervisory role. The Time's Up Act struck the old fifty-employee limit and inserted the under-three clause on purpose, and the state's own commission enforces it that way.
A supervisory employee is anyone with authority to hire, transfer, discharge, assign, reward, discipline, or direct another employee. So a genuine sole trader with no staff has nothing to do here, but a two-person shop where one person directs the other does.
The counting rule catches out-of-state employers too. Headcount counts your employees at any location, while only your Connecticut-based employees need the training. A ten-person firm in another state with one employee in Connecticut is at the three-or-more tier and owes that person two hours.
What Connecticut requires the training to cover
- The federal and state statutory provisions concerning sexual harassment
- The statutory definition of sexual harassment and the types of conduct that may constitute it
- Remedies available to victims, including cease-and-desist orders, reinstatement, back pay, and compensatory damages
- That individuals who harass may be subject to both civil and criminal penalties
- Strategies for preventing harassment in the workplace
- A format allowing participants to ask questions and receive answers, rather than passive viewing
The full structure, scaled to your size
Our standard program with the scope matched to a small team. Nothing structural is missing; the volume is matched to a single state, and the training is built to what Connecticut actually prescribes.
Training That Meets the State's Own Spec
Role-specific training built to the duration, cadence, and content the statute names, and documented to the individual with a date. A completion record that cannot be tied to a named employee on a named day is not much of a record.
Employee Reporting Hotline
A confidential channel by phone, email, or web that does not route through the owner or the one manager. In a small company the person an employee would normally report to is frequently the person they need to report about.
Manager Advisory Line
A number your manager or owner calls before acting, not after. The expensive mistakes in small companies are rarely the original incident. They are the termination, the schedule change, or the reply-all in the week that follows.
Quarterly Check-Ins
A confidential check-in with your team every quarter, so issues surface while they are still small enough to correct. It also builds a dated record showing you were looking, which an employer with no HR department otherwise cannot demonstrate.
Policy, Notice, and Documentation
The written policy, complaint procedure, and posting or distribution obligations the state imposes alongside training, plus the file structure to hold acknowledgments, completion records, and any complaint history.
Investigation Support When You Need It
If a complaint arrives, you are not researching how to run an investigation on the day it lands. Neutral third-party investigation matters more at this size than any other, because there is no one internally who can credibly investigate a colleague they work beside daily.
Connecticut classifies the failure as a discriminatory practice.
In most states, skipping training is an evidentiary weakness that only surfaces once someone complains. Connecticut went further and wrote the training requirement into its definition of a discriminatory practice, which means the failure can be the subject of a commission complaint on its own, carrying the full range of remedies. The commission can also enter your workplace during business hours to examine your training materials and records. Notably the posting and distribution duties were not written into that definition. The training one was.
Posting and policy distribution start at three. Training does not.
The obligations to post the notice and to send every employee the policy within three months of their start date apply only at three or more employees. That is a genuine break for the very smallest businesses and worth knowing. The training duty is the one that has no floor, so a two-person employer's compliance picture is simple: two hours for the supervisor, documented, refreshed at least every decade.
Read what Connecticut requires before you buy anything about it.
The Connecticut compliance page covers the threshold, duration, cadence, content, recordkeeping, and penalties, with the statute cited so you can check it yourself.
Common questions
We have two employees. Are we really covered?
Is this a one-time requirement?
Someone we hired was already trained. Do we redo it?
Do we have to post a notice and send out a policy too?
What is the penalty, and why do we see two different numbers?
Two hours and a record. That is the whole obligation.
In 30 minutes we work out which tier you are in, who counts as a supervisor, whether prior training carries over, and whether your records would survive an inspection. You receive a written gap report either way.