Double maternity leave?

[London7]

Hi

I was wondering about the following...If a woman is on maternity leave with her first child for a year, what happens work-wise if she falls pregnant again when her first baby is say 3 or 4 months old (i.e. she would give birth just when she is due back at work). Is she entitled to any additional maternity leave?

I think you get maternity leave but may not qualify for maternity pay, if you are not earning during the reference period for SMP.

She is entitled to the leave as she is still "employed" during her first leave, however she would need to look at whether she qualified for further SMP. depends when she started her first lot of maternity leave whether she would be getting paid during the qualifying weeks (17-25) for the second lot of leave. she would be able to claim maternity allowance if not though.

At my company there has to be 52 weeks between the day you came back to work from the first maternity leave and 15 weeks before your EDD for the second pregnancy which roughly means you have to be back at work for about 6 months before you get pregnant again. Any sooner, and you just get satutory mat pay, not the company one of 6 months full pay. I think this is reasonably standard at big companies. For the leave, you get up to a year from each birth either way, just whether or not you get full mat pay or just statutory.

There is 16m age gap between my two, I went back to work already pg, worked 5 months full time and got all my mat pay again (statutory only where I worked) and leave.
The statutory pay is calculated from your earnings during a particular period of the pregnancy, so there is an optimum time for returning to work between babies if you want any mat pay again.

maternity leave is 52 weeks in total and depends on when you start it matbackfeck, not 52 weeks from the birth, unless of sourse you work till you (literally) drop! Earliest it can be taken is 11 weeks before your EDD.

Mtbackfeck was talking about her own companys enhanced maternity package that gives 6 months full pay.
For those of us with statutory maternity the are probably lesser requirements but I don't know what they are apart from what happened in my own case.

aha....tis late on a friday. all clear now.