Holiday pay after maternity leave?

poddle911

Hello, just a quick question I think...

I'm going on maternity leave this spring and (ideally) will not be returning to work when this finishes - I plan to take the full 52 weeks. How does it work with the annual leave I will accrue during the 12 months mat leave? Will I be entitled to receive pay for this? Or would I take - for example - 11 months as mat leave, then take four weeks' holiday at the end?

I'm not sure if there is a standard way this is calculated or whether it's down to company policy.

Ditto pensions, will my employer contribution continue to be based on my full annual salary?

Thanks in advance for any input!

Savvy_Sue

You will need to speak to your employer, and set out your intentions in writing, but ...

poddle911 wrote: »

I'm going on maternity leave this spring and (ideally) will not be returning to work when this finishes - I plan to take the full 52 weeks. How does it work with the annual leave I will accrue during the 12 months mat leave? Will I be entitled to receive pay for this? Or would I take - for example - 11 months as mat leave, then take four weeks' holiday at the end?

Where I work, most people finish their maternity leave at the end of the paid period, but then add their accrued leave to this so don't actually return until after they've used that up. In your case, you'd have a period of paid m/l, followed by some unpaid m/l, followed by the paid leave.

I think that has the same effect as being paid for the accrued holiday while still on unpaid m/l ... but you definitely shouldn't lose the holiday.

poddle911 wrote: »

Ditto pensions, will my employer contribution continue to be based on my full annual salary?

Now that's a good question: is your pension currently Auto-Enrolment compliant? That's likely, as they started with larger companies and worked their way down, and we're small and nearly in it now!

I ask that because I checked this with the company who are setting up our AE scheme, and their response was that 'best practice' would suggest that the employer continued to base contributions on the 'normal' salary rather than the actual payments made during maternity leave.

If you're making employee contributions, I believe you can choose whether or not to continue making them, but you would need to check this with the employer: at the moment we pay minimum 2% but match up to 3% if the employee pays more than minimum. So if someone currently paying 3% either stops or reduces payments, we would drop to 2%.

Under AE it's different ...

poddle911

That's really helpful, thank you Savvy Sue. I'd just like to go in as prepared as possible. I'm fairly sure we're AE compliant as we didn't have a pension scheme at all before, and signed up last year so we were ahead of the legal requirement. We're just a small charity, so I imagine they'll want to offer as little as possible, but fingers crossed for the 'best practice' outcome.

Savvy_Sue

it's always worth looking at the legal position:

For pension payments, I've found this.

And this will let you work out dates.

Hope that helps.

Darksparkle

I'm returning to work but I took my annual leave (about 4 weeks) after my maternity pay stopped and then I'll return to work.

However in my work you can do it whatever way you want.

If I wasn't returning to work and wasn't in a hurry for that money, I'd take the full 12 months maternity then take annual until it runs out or take the lump sum.