Parental leave, what is it and when is an employee entitled to it?

Employees can take parental leave for each child under the age of 8. The leave is a maximum of 26 times their weekly hours worked, per child. So someone with an employment contract of 32 hours, is entitled to 26 x 32 hours of parental leave per child.

Parents can take parental leave for several children in parallel: they do not have to first use up all the leave for the first child before taking leave for the second child. It is also the case that both parents are entitled to parental leave, so for the same child both parents can request parental leave. There are other rules concerning parental leave. For example, combining parental leave and reintegration or parental leave and being unfit for work.

An employee can request parental leave at any time after they start working for you. Your employee needs to request the parental leave from you at least 2 months before its start date. If someone wants to take this leave immediately after the birth of a child, then that date is obviously not yet known, but you will have an idea. Useful to know: you cannot refuse a request for parental leave.

Your employee must state in the request how the leave will be spread. You can reject the way in which the hours are spread, provided you have a serious reason for doing so. This kind of situation is obviously not ideal, preferably you would discuss the distribution together so that all the parties agree to it. In this way, everyone benefits from your employee being able to combine their work with their family. An adjustment to the distribution of hours can be made up to 4 weeks before the start of the parental leave. If your employee starts to work more hours or less, and has not yet taken all the parental leave, then a recalculation is needed of the remaining hours of leave.

Parental leave only changes working hours temporarily. Once it is over, the employee simply returns to their previous working hours, the same as before the leave. What can happen, is that your employee may ask for a temporary reorganisation of their hours, for example to make them fit better with child care or school hours. They are entitled to do this for one year. You can extend this period by mutual agreement. Your employee must ask you for this adjustment to their working hours 3 months before the parental leave runs out. You then have until 4 weeks before the end date of that leave to react to the request. You can reject the arrangement of working hours suggested by your employee, but only if they cause a problem for the organisation.

One disadvantage of the existing rules on leave in the Law on flexible working and parental leave, is that it only helps those employees who can afford to take advantage of it. Their salary is not paid during this leave, and many people will need to keep earning the money. Your organisation may fall under a collective agreement, or offer different terms and conditions of employment: you can find this out from HR and it is of course useful to know.

To give working parents more options to combine working and raising their children, the member states of the European Union recently approved a European Directive that states that employees will soon be entitled to 2 months paid parental leave. Every EU country has to implement this in their own legislation. In the Netherlands, from August 2022, employees will receive 9 weeks of parental leave from that will be partially paid. After then, your employees will be entitled to half (50%) of the maximum daily salary (for social security purposes) for 9 weeks. They have to take these 9 weeks of paid leave before their child's first birthday.