maternity allowance when self employed

[cottagerose]

Have just found out I am pregnant and am trying to find out about claiming maternity allowance. I registered as self employed in April after leaving teaching after 13 years at Christmas.
I will have been self employed for a year when the baby comes and believe I can pay my class 2 national insurance contributions early.
Will I also need to provide proof of earnings? I have read that I need to have earned a certain amount over a number of weeks. My current earnings vary week on week and I wondered what evidence do I need to show for these earnings, I have invoices but is this enough? Any advice would be much appreciated, the more I research the more confused I get. Thank you in advance

It might be that you qualify via your previous employment without needing to worry about your current self employed income. If you read the details of qualifying period for MA it covers quite a lengthy period of time. Sorry not sure about how you confirm self employed income. I'm applying soon so will find out then but am expecting to share information from my tax return. Not sure how it works if you haven't completed a tax return though. Good luck!

Unless anything has changed, your payment of NI is what qualifies you for mat allowance. You need to have been registered as self employed with HMRC and paying NI for the correct number of qualifying weeks. That's it. I didn't have to provide any details or proof of my actual income. They'll get all that anyway when you do your tax self-assessment.

Thank you for the advice. It's a lot clearer now, I left full time teaching before the 66 week limit but will have been self employed for a year. I think I just ask if I can pay the NI contributions for this year early.