salary sacrifice and mat leave

[jgulia]

HI All I can't get any decent advice from salaries and wages or our childcare coordinator at work re:financial pros and cons of continuing with salary sacrifice/childcare vouchers during mat leave.I have one child in nursery 2 days a week and this will be reduced to one day during my time off.I need to be able to work out exactly what the financial implications are of sticking with vouchers and getting less mat pay or stopping them.Can anyone shed any light please?Jx

Do you get extra mat pay from your employer or just SMP? If it's just SMP your salary sacrifice can't be deducted from it but you'll still get the vouchers.

If you do get extra mat pay your employer can deduct the salary sacrifice from the extra bit.

I struggled to get a definite answer on this also.

I think the potential downside is that maternity pay is often calculated from your net pay during a set period (around the 15 weeks before your EWC in my case) so unless you have stopped your vouchers before this point your mat pay will be calculated on the lower (post-voucher deduction) amount.

Obviously the benefit is that you continue to save the tax on the vouchers if you continue with them through your mat pay.

Some of this information may be out of date though as my company literature doesn't mention this anymore (new voucher company) and I had to sort of guess what would be best for me!