Neonatal care leave and pay – Employers are you ready?

Following the recent government’s newly published regulations setting out the new statutory rights for neonatal care leave and pay which will come into force on 6 April 2025.  Employers will need to be aware of what these rights are, what their responsibilities are in complying with them and how this can be done. 

What is it? 

Neonatal care for the purposes of the Act, means care of a medical or palliative kind which starts within 28 days of the child’s birth and continues without interruption for a period of at least seven full days. It includes periods where care is received in a hospital, certain follow-up care under a consultant’s direction after an inpatient stay and palliative care. The new rules will apply to employees who are the parents of children who require neonatal care and who are born on or after 6 April 2025 and must be taken within 68 weeks of the Child’s birth.

What do I need to know?

There are two aspects to the rules: 

1. Entitlement to leave: Eligible parents will be entitled to up to 12 weeks’ leave from work if their baby has received neonatal care, this will be a day 1 right which means that the employee does not have to have any length of service to request this leave. And Employers will have to give the eligible parent the time off.
2. Entitlement to pay: The right to statutory neonatal care pay will depend on the employee meeting certain criteria including having 26 weeks’ continuous service by the end of the week before the child’s admission into neonatal care.  The payment will be the same as the normal statutory rate which from April 2025 will be £187.18 per week or 90% of the employees’ average weekly earnings, whichever is lower.

Crucially any entitlement to neonatal care leave and pay is in addition to other statutory leave entitlements that the parents may have, such as maternity, paternity or adoption leave, and Employers will be able to recover it in the same way as other entitlements such as maternity pay. 

Employers should be aware that Parents who take neonatal leave will have the same rights as parents taking other forms of family leave, so they will be protected from detriment and dismissal and provides protection from redundancy. 

What does our Business need to do? 

• You should look to update your current family friendly leave polices so that it is included
• Consider if you provide enhanced pay on certain family friendly policies you may wish to include this as part of the Neonatal leave policy so that everyone is treated the same regardless of the type of leave they take
• Communicate the new policy to all your employees and set out the rules in which to make a request under it.

At Hopkins Solicitors we have a dedicated Employment team who can assist you with a review and update of your handbook policies and procedures so that you are always up to date with your obligations as an Employer.  Contact us for more details.