Maternity leave confusion

[Jadefeather7]

Hi

Was wondering if someone could help.
I am due to give birth in May and have about a month of annual leave left this year (25 days). I had assumed I would be able to take these days before the birth and defer the start of maternity leave until my annual leave days have been used up but I now understand I must start mat leave on the due date, is that correct? Is it also correct that I can’t therefore take the remainder of my leave until the end of my maternity leave. I get full pay for 3 months and would have ideally liked to tag my annual leave on to the beginning or end of that period so I continue to get full pay for 4 months to start with but that doesn’t seem to be possible?

Jess, that’s an interesting approach. Hadn’t thought of using shared parental leave to break it up. Do you get the same pay on shared parental leave I.e statutory maternity pay?

Yep you are both entitled to (between you) the same amount of statutory pay and time off that you would have with mat leave. Obviously your partner would need to take some of your weeks, but that could be as little as one week.

The key thing here is really company policy around annual leave. Mat leave has to start from the date you give birth at the latest, because it is legally required that a woman who has given birth has at least two weeks off work after the birth (four weeks if she works in certain environments, like a factory, IIRC!). It’s built in protection to ensure all women in emplyment have time off immediately after giving birth. This is why you can’t take annual leave up front and over the period in which you give birth, and instead have to either take it prior or after.

The prior or after however depends on your company policy. For example in my workplace you are encouraged to take any currently accrued annual leave prior to mat leave, because otherwise you could end up accruing an unsustainable amount. Let’s say you take a year of mat leave, which is common where I work, you would have a whole year’s entitlement accrued during your mat leave plus whatever you didn’t take before you went on leave; and you might need to ideally use it all up before the end of the annual leave year on your return, which might be hard for the business to sustain, etc.

I’ve also felt it would be great if you could shorten your leave but take all of the SMP. Eg SMP pays just shy of £630/month, let's say you earn £1200/month (for example), you might be able afford, say, five months of leave because it would be about the same as your full time salary. Essentially having access to an SMP ‘pot’ of £4790 plus whatever your 90% is for the first six weeks, but you determine the timescale (within the permitted 52 weeks of leave, so you could drag it out longer than 39 weeks or get it paid shorter than that).

Perhaps it would be a nightmare to administer but I don’t see how. Large companies deduct the SMP costs from their NI contributions; small companies can apply for an advance in full for the cost of the SMP. They just recoup the cost as needed, it doesn’t go beyond the SMP permitted.

I’ve thought about this a lot (it would make my mat leave planning for later this year much easier if I could do this!). Sorry, bit of a tangent there.

I'm the same I have a years Holiday allowance to take before going on mat leave in June and I'm working up to my due date (well planned ELCS date) I will return doing up to 30 KIT days from Sept to Dec and then start back properly 1st Jan. I have been working overtime so on the weeks I have done so I have taken a holiday day too to use some up and so as not to be working extra days some weeks, 6 weeks at 90% then onto stat here for me