However, your period of maternity leave will span two leave years and it is not always possible to use up the current year’s annual leave entitlement before starting your leave. The minimum annual leave is 20 days + 8 bank holidays, and any extra holiday provided for under your contract of employment. However, this does not make the period of maternity or parental leave any longer. The leave has to be taken in a single continuous period (eg. Since I am taking maternity leave this year, my company says that I can take only a total of 100 paid days for the whole year instead of 130 days. This is the line some employers take, and they therefore refuse to carry over accrued holidays on this basis. Everything you need to know about leave. Give us a call or speak to us on LiveChat. It is not possible to take annual leave and maternity leave at the same time, therefore if a worker gives birth whilst on annual leave, before her maternity leave officially begins, her annual leave will stop and her maternity leave will … How soon should I apply for it? Any holiday accrued after the initial six months of maternity leave should be taken when the employee returns to work. Public Holidays and Annual Leave. Your pay and conditions must be the same as or better than if you hadn’t gone on maternity leave. Maternity leave is usually created from a variety of benefits that include sick leave, vacation, holiday time, personal days, short-term disability and unpaid family leave time. You can calculate your entitlement to annual leave by using the holiday calculator. If they are on annual leave when their baby is born, maternity leave will start on that day and their annual leave will finish. You should plan your annual leave around your maternity leave with your manager. For example, they could get Parental Leave Pay and also take all of the following at the same time: paid maternity leave; annual leave; unpaid parental leave. Annual leave cannot be taken during maternity leave and your employer must therefore allow you to take your holiday entitlement outside of the leave period. If the employee is certified sick then the employer cannot insist that he take annual leave to cover this period. For example, if you are on maternity leave, you cannot take annual leave at the same time: you must take it before or after your maternity leave. Here we accrue AL but it's subject to normal carry forward limits of 5 days between leave years - that means that I will need to take 2008/2009 AL over 5 days before going on maternity leave (baby due end of Jan). It is up to you to decide when you wish to take your annual leave and you should agree it with your employer in the usual way. Your payments for annual leave are affected in the 12 months after you return to work. Please don’t enter any personal information—if you need more help, get in touch with our support team. You also have the right to take up to 16 weeks’ additional maternity leave, but it is not covered by Maternity Benefit. This is because leave she becomes entitled to while on parental leave or during the 12 months after she returns is paid at average weekly earnings only (not ordinary weekly pay). That means you will carry on accruing paid holiday entitlement for as long as you're on maternity leave. Your annual leave entitlement is based on your current contract of employment. André Claassen Annual leave entitlement. Where eligible, it is also possible for employees to take other kinds of paid leave at the same time as unpaid parental leave, including annual leave and long service leave. If you decide you want to leave your job during or after maternity leave, you follow the usual process for resigning from a job, including the same notice period. The Act states that the provisions for annual leave do not apply to an employee who works less than 24 hours per month for an employer, and also these provisions do not apply to leave granted to an employee in excess of the entitlement allowed in terms of the BCEA. Her holiday year runs from 1 January – 31 December and her contract states that she gets 20 days’ holiday plus 8 public holidays each year. An employee must therefore be given the right to take her statutory annual leave either before she goes on maternity leave or on her return (the current statutory minimum is 28 days). Your employer can refuse annual leave where it coincides with a busy time of year or a lot of other employees are taking leave at the same time but they should not refuse to allow you to take annual leave because you are going to take maternity leave or you have been absent on maternity leave, as that may be maternity discrimination. Both paid and unpaid maternity leave are statutory entitlements. Therefore, when she returns (on or around 1 October 2019) she will have 8 days’ accrued holiday from 2018 and 21 days’ accrued holiday from 2019 (from 1 January – 1 December 2019), in total 29 days’ holiday which she is able to take prior to returning to work. However, the right to carry holiday over from one annual leave year to the next depends on the terms of the employment contract with the employer and not the legislation governing maternity leave. 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