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It may affect your tax obligations, including:
- child support
- HECS liabilities
- Medicare Levy Surcharge
- public housing rent
- low income or other health care cards, or other associated concessions
- pensioner and beneficiary tax offsets.
Parental Leave Pay also affects:
- family assistance payments
- income support payments
- child support payments.
Family assistance payments
If you’re eligible, you can get Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A while you’re getting Parental Leave Pay.
You and your partner can’t get FTB Part B while you’re getting Parental Leave Pay. You can only get it on days you aren’t getting Parental Leave Pay.
If you get Parental Leave Pay for a child, you won’t get Newborn Upfront Payment or Newborn Supplement for them.
Parental Leave Pay counts as income in calculating family assistance payments. Family assistance payments include FTB and Child Care Subsidy.
Your family income estimate should include any Parental Leave Pay you expect to get.
Income support payments
When we consider your and your partner’s eligibility for income support payments, Parental Leave Pay is an assessable income.
This means you and your partner may get a lower rate of income support while you get Parental Leave Pay. When your Parental Leave Pay ends, we’ll adjust your and your partner’s income support again.
In some cases, your income will be too high to keep getting your income support payment. If your income support stops, you can apply for it again after your Parental Leave Pay ends.
How to minimise an overpayment
You and your partner may get overpaid if both of the following apply:
- you or your partner get an income support payment
- you choose to take your Parental Leave Pay for days that are in the past.
This is because we count Parental Leave Pay as income.
If you get overpaid, you’ll have to pay the amount back.
You can minimise this by choosing to take Parental Leave Pay for days that are in the future. Learn more about how to take your payment.
Child support payments
We treat Parental Leave Pay as income for child support purposes.
Parental Leave Pay and leave from work
The Paid Parental Leave scheme gives you a payment. It doesn’t give you an entitlement to leave from work.
It’s important to organise leave from your work with your employer. You should try to do this at least 10 weeks before you plan to take leave.
You can also get Parental Leave Pay with any of your existing employer provided paid or unpaid leave.
You can take Parental Leave Pay before, during or after any paid or unpaid employer funded leave. This includes all of the following:
- maternity or parental leave
- annual leave
- long service leave.
Paid Parental Leave and existing employer provided leave entitlements
Your employer may provide maternity or parental leave through an industrial agreement or law. If they do, they can’t withdraw your entitlement to that leave while the agreement or law is in effect. The Paid Parental Leave scheme doesn’t change any existing employer provided leave entitlements.
The Supporting Working Parents website has information about your rights:
- in the workplace while pregnant
- during parental leave
- when you return to work.