Confused about entitlements

[Dsmora]

I can't seem to get a good idea of what my husband and I are entitled to.
My husband works full time, £18,000 per year in a family business. I am planning (if viable) to drop to part time hours in my current job once our baby is born and I return after maternity leave.
We live in privately rented accommodation, a two bed house, £650 a month. Is there anything that we can claim if I'm working say 16 hours per week?

One your baby is born you may be entitled to child tax credits if your household income is likely to drop below £25k ish. If you are going to be paying childcare then you may also get help towards childcare costs when you go back to work. You will get child benefit of around £20 a week. You may also get some housing benefit.
tax credits are initially based on your joint income for the previous tax year so you may initially be told you are not entitled. You then need to ring them back with an estimate of household income based on the current tax year which would be lower if you are on mat leave or part time.

You can use one of the online benefit calculaters and put in various figures to see what help you would get. Are you currently a higher earner than your dh ?

Google "entitled to" there's a benefit calculator there.

We currently earn the same amount as each other.
I've been messing about with benefits calculators but it always comes back as an entitlement of £0, which just seemed mental to me given what I've seen others have said they receive.

When you do the benefit calculators you need to pretend that your child is already here otherwise you won't get an accurate picture of how much you'll get. Just make up a date of birth. It's anonymous and doesn't save anywhere.

That's probably the mistake you've made. Believing what other people tell you they receive. Benefits are no where near as generous as people think they are

Perhaps I have been naive!

We were just looking into options - obviously if we will be better off with me working full time and us paying childcare that's what I will do, but it would be our preference that I work part time if able.

I think the only way people receive a lot of tax credits is if you have 3 or 4 or more kids and one parent working. Couples like yourselves with a first baby are unlikely to get much as the threshold is really quite low. the thresholdscurrently go up with each additional child however after April this year, child tax creidts will be limited to 2 children only.

Would it be an option to work around each other?. We have 4 kids and get no tax creidts. We have always worked around each other to make things work and not have to pay huge amounts in childcare.

I think if you went back at 16 hours pro rata on a salary of £18k it would give you an income of around £8k so you wouldn't qualify for any tax credits unless you were paying childcare costs.

We could do! We are in the fortunate position that my MIL has offered to have our LO for two days per week which makes things a lot easier - we are very very lucky. I was just hoping to then pay childcare for maybe two or three days per week, working a three or four day week.

Sorry, paying one or two days of childcare.

Hopefully you would still get some help with childcare costs. Good luck.