Eligibility
Shared parental leave
To be eligible for shared parental leave:
- The employee must share care of the child with their partner, joint adopter or the child's other parent.
- The employee or their partner must be eligible for maternity pay or leave, maternity allowance or adoption pay or leave.
In addition, the employee must have been employed by you for at least 26 continuous weeks before their qualifying week and remain employed by you when they take their leave.
Shared parental pay
To be eligible for shared parental pay, the employee must:
- Qualify for statutory maternity pay (SMP) or statutory adoption pay (SAP)
or - Qualify for statutory paternity pay (SPP) or statutory paternity pay (adoption) (SPP(A)) and have a partner who qualifies for SMP, maternity allowance (MA) or SAP
For full information about eligibility, visit HMRC's website.
Before you enter shared parental pay details
To process ShPP for an employee, you must first enter the details of the original parental leave, for example statutory paternity pay (SPP). This ensures that the employee is entitled to SPL. For help with entering the original leave, check the relevant guide below:
Have you had previous periods of ShPP? Read more > Previous periods of ShPP
If you've previously set up ShPP, before you can enter the details for the current ShPP period, you'll need to remove the previous information. If you try to enter a new ShPP period without doing this, the following message appears:
'Shared parental pay (ShPP) has been set up against a different statutory payment. To view or amend the details, select the original statutory payment > Shared Parental Pay. To enter ShPP against a different statutory payment, first select the original statutory payment > Clear Values.'
To remove previous periods of ShPP
If you're processing your employee's ShPP for a second child against the same payment type, for example a second instance of SMP, before you enter the new details you must clear the old values. You can do this when you set up ShPP.
If a second instance of ShPP is linked to a different statutory payment than the first, you'll need to remove the details of the original instance. For example, if you processed ShPP linked to your employee's SMP for their first child and they then adopt a second child, you must remove the values from SMP before you can enter ShPP against their SAP.
- Double-click the relevant employee.
- Click the Absence tab.
- Click the original payment type, for example SMP.
- Click Shared Parental Pay.
- Click Clear Values, then click Yes.
- Click OK.
An employee doesn't have to take the original parental leave but you must still confirm that the employee was eligible to receive the payment. You can then enter the relevant details into Sage 50 Payroll.
For example, if the employee doesn't take SPP, you must enter the Date Baby Due and Actually Born On date. You can then select the Declaration Received check box and click Auto Calc to calculate the employee's average weekly gross pay.
You can then enter the relevant details for Shared Parental Pay. The following message appears:
Set up ShPP in your payroll
Lets get this set up in your software to automatically calculate the pay. Read more >
If the original statutory payment was set to use manual calculations, the shared parental pay is also manual and won't automatically calculate entitlement. When you pay the employee, you can enter the value for ShPP within Enter Payments, and then Summary.
Shared Parental Leave in touch days
Also known as SPLit days, this is where your employee attends work for up to 20 days during SPL.
SPLit days are optional, both the employee and employer must agree to them. For more information, visit Gov.UK >
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