Preterm baby payments and parental leave payments

It’s not possible to get preterm baby payments and parental leave pay at the same time.

Usually, your parental leave payments start when your preterm payments end.

You can start your parental leave payments later than this, for example, if you’ve already agreed with your employer to go on parental leave at a later date. That means there’ll be a gap between your:

preterm payments ending, and

parental leave payments starting.

During this time, you can work if you want to. Your parental leave payments will then start on whichever is earliest:

the date you go on parental leave

the original date your baby was due.

If you’ve already started getting parental leave payments before your preterm baby was born, you’ll need to contact Inland Revenue to get your preterm payments instead. Your parental leave payments will:

stop when the preterm baby payments start

start again when the preterm payments end.