Self employed mums - Maternity allowance (Mat leave)

[BTdogmum]

Good morning

Please can anyone advise if you’ve had to pay class 2 national insurance contributions to be eligible for the full maternity allowance (£180pw)

I haven’t earnt enough to pay class 2 contributions but online it says 13 weeks out of 66 before baby is born need to be paid at £3.45pw. I’ve calculated that to be a one off payment of £44.85, however it doesn’t seem a lot to boost my weekly payments from £27 to £180!

I have contacted HMRC twice and they’ve just told me to wait and they will write to me with the amount I owe. I’m slightly worried I’m going to end up with a huge bill when I’m budgeting already for baby and not earning a huge amount from my business to start with! (I haven’t been trading very long and after struggling with infertility for a many years, a baby was the last surprise we expected) although wonderful 😊

any advice greatly appreciated xx

Mine was like this last time - they called me and said you owe NI you can either pay to get the full amount of allowance or have the £27 and I said how much NI is it, and it was something like £32 😂 crazy!

I've just applied for my MA for this pregnancy too - I got a text yesterday saying they'd received my application now (which I sent off last week) and they would take up to 4 weeks to make a decision...so it'll either be approved or they'll call if I owe outstanding NI again

@BeautyAndTheBump1 thank you so much! So it might be correct then, do you mind me asking how long ago your maternity was please? X

After i filled in my application form for mat allowance and sent it off, i received a letter from hmrc telling me that i needed to pay about £12 in ni to get the full allowance rate. Make sure you chase up if you don't hear anything. My application got lost in the system, so i lost a bit of money, which was a pain in the arse.

@Roarasaurus thank you for that! X