Neonatal Care Leave and Pay: The UK Employer's Guide

Roughly one in seven babies born in the UK spends time in neonatal care. Until April 2025, the parents of those babies had exactly the same leave entitlement as everyone else — which meant a father often spent most of his two weeks of paternity leave sitting beside an incubator, and a mother's maternity leave started ticking down while her baby was still in hospital.

Neonatal care leave fixes that. It is a new statutory entitlement of up to 12 weeks, sitting on top of every other form of parental leave. This guide sets out the qualifying tests, the difference between the leave and the pay, and the practical business of recording it — because it is the first parental entitlement that can be taken in non-continuous blocks, and that has consequences for how you track it.

What Is Neonatal Care Leave?

Neonatal care leave was created by the Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 and came into force on 6 April 2025. It gives eligible employed parents up to 12 weeks of leave where their baby is admitted to neonatal care shortly after birth.

The two things to hold onto:

• It is additional. It does not come out of maternity, paternity, adoption or shared parental leave. It is added to them.
• The leave and the pay have different eligibility rules. An employee can be entitled to the leave but not the pay.

The Two Qualifying Tests

Both of these must be satisfied:

A baby admitted on day 30 does not trigger the entitlement. Nor does a five-day admission on day 2. Both tests have to be met.

The seven-day period is counted from the day after admission, so a baby admitted on a Monday and discharged the following Monday meets the test. Where an employee is close to the line, ask for the admission and discharge dates rather than guessing.

Who Can Take It?

The entitlement belongs to employees with parental responsibility for the baby. In practice this covers:

• The baby's mother
• The baby's father
• The partner of the baby's mother, including same-sex partners
• The intended parent in a surrogacy arrangement
• An adoptive parent, where the qualifying conditions are met

It is an individual entitlement. Both parents can take it, and both can be off at the same time — which is often exactly what the situation calls for.

Leave vs Pay: The Two Different Tests

This is the part employers most often get wrong.

Statutory Neonatal Care Pay is paid at the standard rate for family-related statutory pay, or 90% of the employee's average weekly earnings if that is lower. The flat rate changes each April, so check the current figure on GOV.UK rather than carrying last year's number forward into your payroll. The same trap catches employers running maternity and paternity pay each year.

An employee with three months' service whose baby is in neonatal care for a fortnight is entitled to the leave and not the pay. Telling them they are not entitled to anything is a common and costly mistake.

How the Leave Is Taken: Tier 1 and Tier 2

Neonatal care leave is unusual in that it can be taken in non-continuous blocks, but only during a defined window. The regulations split it into two tiers:

• Tier 1 — leave taken while the baby is still receiving neonatal care, and in the week immediately afterwards. This can be taken in separate, non-continuous blocks, and the notice requirements are short, reflecting the reality that nobody plans a neonatal admission.
• Tier 2 — leave taken after that window closes. This must be taken as a single continuous block, and longer notice applies.

Either way, leave is taken in whole weeks — a minimum of one week per block — and the whole entitlement must be used within 68 weeks of the birth. That long window exists deliberately so a mother can use neonatal care leave after her maternity leave ends rather than being forced to overlap the two.

Notice requirements differ between the tiers and are set out in the regulations. Rather than reproduce day counts that change with the detail of each case, point your managers at the GOV.UK guidance linked at the end of this article and build the notice fields into your request form.

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Employment Protections

Employees on neonatal care leave keep their terms and conditions apart from pay, continue to accrue holiday, and have the right to return to their job. They are protected from detriment for taking or seeking to take the leave, and dismissal for that reason is automatically unfair.

Neonatal care leave also carries enhanced redundancy protection in line with the wider protections for parents returning from family leave.

What Employers Should Do Now

1. Add it to your family leave policy. If your policy was written before April 2025, it does not mention this entitlement.
2. Separate the leave test from the pay test in your policy and in your payroll process, so a short-service employee is not wrongly refused the leave.
3. Create a distinct leave type in your system. Do not record it as maternity or paternity — it is neither, and merging them destroys your ability to report accurately.
4. Capture the admission and discharge dates on the request, since both qualifying tests turn on them.
5. Brief line managers on tone. A parent making this request is having one of the worst weeks of their life. The process should ask for as little as the law requires.
6. Check your enhanced pay policy. If you enhance maternity or paternity pay, decide deliberately whether to enhance this too, and write the answer down.

Practically, a leave management system earns its keep here: 12 weeks taken in scattered one-week blocks across a 68-week window is not something a spreadsheet handles gracefully, as our comparison of spreadsheets versus leave software sets out.

Key Takeaways

• In force since 6 April 2025 — up to 12 weeks, additional to all other parental leave
• Baby must be admitted to neonatal care within 28 days of birth, for a continuous stay of at least seven days
• The leave is a day-one right; the pay needs 26 weeks' service and earnings at or above the lower earnings limit
• Both parents can claim it independently and take it at the same time
• Tier 1 leave (during care) can be non-continuous; Tier 2 must be a single block
• Must be used within 68 weeks of birth
• Record it as its own leave type, and capture admission and discharge dates

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

• Neonatal care leave and pay — GOV.UK
• Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 — legislation.gov.uk