Please help me understand shared parental leave pay!

[DorritoPaws]

Hi all,

As the title suggests, I'm trying sort out what we're due re maternity / paternity pay and am getting really confused so wonder if someone here can help? My job doesn't have a maternity policy and HR are useless so can't ask them.

Situation is, I'm due to go on maternity leave soon and I am only entitled to statutory maternity pay which runs for 39 weeks. However my partner's company are very generous and are offering 12 weeks fully paid paternity. Ideally, I would like one parent at home with the baby until it's one year old and then it will go into creche.

Obviously since we're effectively on one salary for a year, I'd like to maximise the amount that we receive weather it be SMP or the enhanced pay my partner gets..

My question is, can I take the full 39 weeks allowance at £148.68, then my partner take over on enhanced pay for 12 weeks, effectively giving us a years worth of pay in some form? I'm really unsure as to wether we can claim SMP for the full 39 weeks and then the paternity for a following 12 weeks or does it need to overlap and we're only entitled to 39 weeks pay altogether?

I don't know if I'm just being thick and this is baby brain or this is genuinely really complex!

From googling you have to reduce your maternity pay period by 12 weeks in order for him to be able to get the 12 weeks shared parental pay. You also need to reduce your leave to allow him to take 12 weeks off

maternityaction.org.uk/advice/shared-parental-leave-and-pay/

Shared parental leave IS complicated so it's not you! You can both be off at the same time but those weeks "count double" as they're deducted for you and deducted for your partner. Or you can be off separately but the total number of weeks can't be more than your maximum entitlement.

It sounds like this hinges on your partner's employer's policy on the enhanced company paternity leave - if they are treating it entirely separately to shared parental leave, your plan may be possible.

So you could do: partner's statutory paternity leave of 2 weeks, plus his company's offer of a further 10 weeks taken at any time the company policy permits, plus either he or you (separately or together) taking the max statutory entitlement of up to 39 weeks.

SPL means you share the time off. So if you want your DP to take 12 weeks you will need to take this out of your allowance.

My DH and I are doing the same thing, sharing parental leave when our DC is born. His work also offers an addition to the standard paternity leave of 2 weeks, to total 4 weeks. But, he has to take this prior to shared parental leave starting, he also can't take shared parental leave and receive the paternity leave pay.

So, we are doing it in that he will take paternity for 4 weeks and then share the remaining weeks of my maternity together. I would get your DH to ask his employer to clarify the rules of the pay and leave :)