Shared Parental Leave? No idea how it or the pay works!

[goggles43]

Hi all
I’m a full time employee (currently on mat leave) entitles to 52 weeks leave and DH is part time (for childcare)

I earn approx £1850/month and DH earns about £500

I’m interested in Shared Parentsl Leave but for some reason can’t seem to understand the logistics explained on gov.uk.

Can anyone please help explain?

I initially planned to be off on mat leave for 9 months (36 weeks) and return to work as normal but could the remaining weeks go to DH under SPL? And if so, what would the pay be for me or DH?

Please help me understand - so confused!

Thank you

bump

Under shared parental leave/pay you meed to cut short your leave/pay to create it for your dh. Leave is OK but you will already have used all your maternity pay so unless your dh gets a decent shared parental leave package he may not get much money (if any)

You’ll be entitled to 39 weeks’ pay in total between you. You can ‘curtail’ your maternity leave early, to either allow DH to take the rest or to take some together or whatever you want. But if you want to personally take 39 weeks paid leave, then DH won’t get any pay if you then curtail your maternity leave as the remainder will be unpaid.

I did this with my husband, I took nine months and he did three. I think what you get depends on what your companies offer, so you each need to check the SPL package at your company.

We did this with our son at my DPs request. I went on maternity leave in the March and then was "back at work" for the first day of the summer holidays (I'm a teacher) which meant my partner was on shared parental leave until he returned in January of this year.

What I would say is that the shared parental leave pay wasn't great, it was the same as SMP (from my memory) and so it was a stress for my partner who I think didn't like being on such a low wage. We couldn't afford the last 3 months as regardless whether it was me or him off it would have been unpaid.

I would also advise that you talk to your employers sooner rather than later, both my partner and I work for big companies who operate over multiple sites, I was only the 2nd woman to request this and DP was the 1st their HR company had processed. From that stance it took longer to organise than we initially thought, as my son was also 3 weeks prem that then altered start dates and end dates so we needed to factor that in as well when he was born.

Hope that helps, if you have any other questions I can certainly attempt to answer them.

It does vary from company to company. We did six months shared parental leave each, and I still don't understand what we did really, but HR sorted it all! Even if you get less money when DH does his leave, it will be very much worth it for the time he gets to spend looking after LO full time.