Maternity Pay/Leave

Where do you live?

I live in the UK. I get 52weeks off + 1month AL

SMP is paid to you for 39 weeks, and depending on your company’s policy you may get a bit of extra pay on top of that for up to 12 weeks, I got extra paid for mine up to 8 weeks on top of SMP. To be qualified, you need to be under the company’s employment for at least 26 weeks when you reached the 15th week before your expected date - so you have to count backwards from your due date to the 15th week. I wasn’t qualified for my first baby, so I had to apply for SMA(Statuary Maternity Allowance) which pays slightly less but still better than nothing. And even if you can get SMP, you will actually need to apply for SMA after your 39th week, so to extend your maternity from week 39-52, you’ll need to get SMA, as your company no longer requires to pay you SMP. Again, depends n the company’s policy, you might still get pay after, if they have that in their policy. I took about 7 months off for my first, and 9 months plus 2 weeks of AL for my second.

You need to speak to human resource and your manager if you don’t know what to do. All of this can be found on the gov.uk site

@Nattinan thank you for all the resources. Thankfully I am qualified for maternity pay from my employer this time as I wasn’t with my first either. I am so grateful my employer has a great 😌 package but even with that I have figured I need to save for about 4months of my half of the bills even with SMP in order to take the full year off. I’m just wondering with the current cost of living, how people are saving for maternity leave. It was so much easier to save with my first in the pandemic.

I went through all of my current bills and cancelled anything that was a luxury (Spotify, Amazon Prime etc.). Anything that was on a monthly charge that could be annual I paid off so I wouldn’t have to keep paying during maternity leave. I stocked up on the expensive bits now so I wouldn’t need to buy as much during my leave (nappies/wipes/formula etc). We also stopped going out for meals, ordering takeaway, having expensive days out. As boring as it sounds, meal planning really helped us save money. Split the money you need for those four months over the next months you have until your leave and treat it like another bill now, so put an extra £150/month into a separate account each month as though you’re paying a bill. You’ll be surprised how much you save just by not thinking about it as “available funds”. I was paying £250 car finance and when it finished I just kept paying it into a building society account that I couldn’t access, saved quite a lot ready before my leave.

Plus because you have just gone through the heavy lifting of carrying and giving birth and will be nursing I think your partner should cover a good portion of your half of the bills to be fair.

@Rhianna this is such a smart way to do it. I am doing very similar, we already don’t pay for things like Amazon or Netflix or Spotify. I am very okay watching Ads so I don’t have to worry about that. Being pregnant food can be tricky right now and I wish I was done paying off my car, unfortunately I still have another 3years to go although we were going to try pay it off in a year and half by making every payments but now we put that money aside too. We are not big on eating out but we do the occasional take always maybe once or twice a month if that. I like the idea of buying nappies and wipes now, totally makes sense.

@Bode Absolutely agree! Thank God my husband is quite happy with me managing our finances as I am the natural saver. We both earn very similar amounts, I earn slight more so I have worked out that to cover all our basic needs in that time we still need to save about £1000/month for those 4 months but we are both saving towards it now, my husband will be paying majority of our bills in this time. I see a lot of women on YouTube only saving towards maternity leave or still paying all the bills in that time, I never understand why. I understand that I can probably apply for UC in those monthly but it won’t be much and this gives me more peace of mind.

Both my husband and I get a year off with 6 months full pay, then 3 months statutory, then nothing for the last 3. We’ve been saving everything we can since finding out. We will have enough to cover our mortgage/bills for the last 6 months but nowhere near what we will lose in salary we will have to find cheap ways to entertain ourselves 😅

@Kim wow what does your husband do for work? That’s amazing. I am taking a year off but only getting full pay for 4months half for another 4, 7 weeks SMP then 3months nothing but to be safe we are saving for at least 4months. Thankfully my husband gets 4months off paid and I am very grateful for that

Works in banking. I’m hoping I can also save during the 6 months we get paid, I’d kind of forgotten that my wages don’t just stop when the baby comes 😂