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Are you entitled to parental leave?

You have the right to parental leave if you:

• have been employed by the same company for a year or more
• are an 'employee', with a contract of employment (most agency and casual staff don't have the right to parental leave)

and you:

• are a parent named on the child's birth certificate or
• are named on the child's adoption certificate or
• have legal parental responsibility for a child under five (18 if disabled)

Either parent has the right to parental leave. If you're separated and you don’t live with the children, you have the right to parental leave if you keep formal parental responsibility for the children.

Foster parents do not have rights to parental leave.

• Are you a 'worker', 'employee' or 'self-employed'?
• Employment contracts

If you don't qualify for parental leave

If you don't qualify for parental leave but need time off to care for your child, you could

• take paid holiday
• ask your employer for unpaid time off
• ask your employer about flexible working

If there's a genuine emergency and you need to take time off at short notice, your employer may let you take emergency leave or you may have the right to take time off to arrange for care.

• Time off for dependants (compassionate leave)
• Holiday entitlements: the basics
• Flexible working and work-life balance

How much parental leave can you take?

You can take a total of up 13 weeks' parental leave for each of your children up until their fifth birthday.

If your child is adopted, you can take a total of up to 13 weeks' parental leave until the fifth anniversary of their placement with you or until their 18th birthday, whichever comes first.

If your child is disabled (that is, getting disability living allowance) you have the right to take up to 18 weeks' parental leave until their 18th birthday.

• Caring for a disabled child

Parental leave is an individual right and you cannot transfer the leave between parents, for example a father cannot decide to take only 10 weeks and the mother take 16 weeks.

Deciding to take parental leave

The purpose of parental leave is to care for your child. This means looking after their welfare and could include making arrangements for the good of your child.

Caring for a child does not necessarily mean being with the child 24 hours a day. Parental leave might be taken simply to enable you to spend more time with your young child. Examples of the way parental leave might be used include:

• spending more time with your child in their early years
• accompanying your child during a stay in hospital
• looking at new schools
• settling your child into new childcare arrangements
• enabling your family to spend more time together, for example, taking your child to stay with grandparents

You can take parental leave immediately after your maternity, paternity or adoption leave providing you give the correct notice.

Parental leave schemes

Wherever possible, employers and employees should make their own agreements about how parental leave will work in a workplace, but if this is not possible the following 'fallback scheme' applies automatically. The terms of your workplace agreement cannot be less favourable than the fallback scheme.

Always check your contract of employment or staff handbooks for your employers own parental leave scheme, this could offer you special arrangements that are better than the fallback scheme (for example, you might be able to take parental leave even if you've worked there for less than a year or if you are the grandparents, step-parents or long term foster parent of the child).

The fallback scheme

One week blocks

You must take your leave in blocks of full weeks, so if you want time off in odd days - for example, to take your child to the dentist - you should ask your employer if you can work flexibly or use your holiday allowance.

A week is based on your usual working pattern. So if you work Mondays and Tuesdays only, a week would be two days or if you work Monday – Friday, a week would be five days.

• Holiday entitlements: the basics
• Flexible working and work-life balance

If your child has a disability, you can take time off in days instead of weeks, so you could use parental leave for regular hospital visits.

Four weeks per year

You can't take more than four weeks' leave for any one child in a year.

For these purposes, a year starts when you become eligible for parental leave (either when the child is born, or when you have worked for your employer continuously for one year, which ever comes later)

More useful links

• More about working families and flexible working Opens new window
• Time off for dependants
• Working parents rights in Northern Ireland (DELNI) Opens new window
• Advice for employers on parental leave and time off for dependants from Business Link Opens new window