Providing Parental Leave Pay

Getting funds

You don’t have to provide Parental Leave Pay before you get the funds from us. We’ll transfer funds into your nominated bank account before your employee’s usual pay cycle cut off. This is normally 7 days before. You don’t need to open a separate bank account to get Paid Parental Leave funds. To nominate a bank account:

Log in to Business Hub, on behalf of your business.
Select Your services.
Select Paid Parental Leave Services.
Select Payment destinations.

You’ll get the funds in instalments, either fortnightly or 6-weekly. We’ll send you a payment advice every time we deposit funds into your account. You are only required to administer the funds up until the current pay period in which you receive them, including any arrears. Future payments should not be paid until the relevant pay cycle. You’ll be able to change the bank account details online using Business Hub.

Call us if you don’t think you have enough to provide your employee’s next payment on the day it’s due. You should call the Paid Parental Leave Scheme for employers.

Making payments to employees

When to pay your employee

You must provide Parental Leave Pay to your employee according to their normal pay cycle. For example, if you usually pay them fortnightly in arrears, you must provide their Parental Leave Pay fortnightly in arrears. You can’t provide it in one lump sum and your employee can’t take it at half pay. If we pay you any arrears, you can either:

provide these to your employee in a lump sum
pay them according to their normal pay cycle for any periods in the future.

From 1 July 2024, the rate of Parental Leave Pay is $915.80 per week, before tax.

Everyone gets Parental Leave Pay at the same weekly payment rate. Neither of the following will impact this:

how many hours your employee was working
how much money they were earning before they went on leave.

How long you must pay your employee

You will need to provide a continuous block of Parental Leave Pay.

We will tell you how long to provide the funds for each employee.

Depending on their circumstances, they may get up to 22 weeks of Parental Leave Pay.

Deductions

The only deductions you can make from an employee’s Parental Leave Pay are:

Pay As You Go (PAYG) withholdings - you must withhold tax from your employee’s Parental Leave Pay at the appropriate rate
child support deductions, if your employee has a child support liability
automatic deductions that your employee has in place as part of their usual pay arrangements
garnishee arrangements
voluntary contributions to their superannuation, including salary sacrifice arrangements.

Superannuation contributions

You don’t have to make superannuation contributions for Parental Leave Pay. But the Paid Parental Leave scheme doesn’t prevent you from making voluntary superannuation contributions.

Notifying employees

Record of instalment

You’ll need to give your employee written notification of their Parental Leave Pay within one working day of paying it. This can be on the usual payslip or in a separate notice, such as a letter or email.

The notification must include all of the following:

your business or trading name
your Australian Business Number (ABN)
the employee’s name
the period to which the Parental Leave Pay relates
the date you paid or will pay the Parental Leave Pay
the gross amount of Parental Leave Pay
the total PAYG amount deducted for all taxable entitlements paid in the pay period
the total net amount of payment.

If you make other deductions the record must also include details about these. For example if you make superannuation contributions or deduct child support. The record should include both:

the amount of the deduction
the name and number of the account into which the deduction’s paid.

Payment summaries

You must include Parental Leave Pay in the total amount on your employee’s annual or part year payment summary. You don’t need to separately identify it from other amounts.

Get the Employer Toolkit

The Employer Toolkit is your complete guide to the Paid Parental Leave scheme and what you need to do.

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