maternity pay overseas

[newname]

Hypothetically speaking... my dh may be going overseas with work for 1 year in the autumn. We have been assuming that I would need to resign my (permanent) post. Ds is 1yr+ and we want to have another at some stage. Would it be above board to get pregnant now (big assumption!), use this year's (generous) annual leave quotient before going onto maternity leave (18 weeks full pay) and staying off for my 52 weeks entitlement, coming back from overseas and back into my job? All advice greatly appreciated.

[jsmummy]

The way I see it, you're entitled to your annual leave whatever your future plans; if you get pregnant you're entitled to maternity leave and the full 52 weeks if you want it and it's no-one's business but your own where you are or what you do in that time! If you go overseas and have a job to come back to, brilliant! It sounds like a perfect plan to me...or did I misunderstand the question?

[newname]

No - that's the question. It just seems to be a bit too good to be true! I'd rather know now that there's a catch than get my hopes up.

[sis]

newname, the only problem I can think of is that you are only legally entitled to the proportion of annual leave up to the end of the eighteen weeks of statutory maternity leave. so it is all in the timing!

You also need to check that you will be allowed to take your annual leave entitlement in one large chunk - some companies only allow a maximum of two weeks at a time. The good news is that you also have an entitlement of up to 4 weeks unpaid parental leave each year for each child (total of 13 weeks per child until the child reaches 5 years of age) so, you could have up to 12 weeks extra unpaid leave (4 weeks for ds in this year and 4 weeks for ds and 4 weeks for new baby in the next year).

HTH.

[JoAnne427]

oh my - those maternity leave's sound dreamy! I had two weeks full pay (only because I had a c-section!) and 4 more weeks partial pay. Then used up left over vacation time (3 weeks) and was done with it!

Maybe I need to move before the next one..