What is the employer’s certificate for parental allowance?

The employer’s certificate is a document that is added to the application for parental allowance. This certificate includes information from the employer on the employment relationship, the maternity protection benefits provided by the employer during the maternity protection period and, if applicable, on part-time work while receiving parental benefit. The document is filled in and signed by the employer and submitted with the parental allowance application to the relevant parental allowance office.

Can parental allowance be extended?

In principle parents parents money for twelve months are entitled. The parental allowance can be paid out in full for a maximum period of fourteen months. This extension by two months longer parental allowance works with the help of the partnership bonus.

In return, both parents must look after the child together for two months and are not allowed to work full-time. With the ElterngeldPlus, 50% of the parental allowance is paid out over twice the period. Twenty-four months is possible here, and with the partnership bonus even twenty-eight months.

Does parental allowance affect the Christmas bonus?

The Christmas bonus is a one-time special payment, a bonus that is paid in addition to the salary. This means that you get the parental allowance parallel to the Christmas bonus. Basically, the parental allowance has no influence on the Christmas bonus. However, special payments such as Christmas or vacation pay are taken into account when calculating the parental allowance and can lead to a larger sum of parental allowance per month.

How can the parental allowance be divided between the parents?

Basically, there are four ways of splitting parental leave. A common parental leave is one possibility, but the father can start his parental leave immediately after the birth and the mother after eight or twelve weeks of maternity leave. This variant supplies parents a possibility of getting to know each other intensively as new family and of caring for the child together.

Another option is the combination of part-time work and parental leave. Here, both parents take parental leave and continue working part-time. One parent can look after the child in the morning and the other parent in the afternoon.

A maximum of 30 hours of working time per week is required. In addition, there is also the possibility to change in the middle. The mother can look after the child for seven months on parental leave and then the father for seven months.

Depending on the income of the parents, it is worth calculating beforehand how this division of work/care affects the family budget. Finally, there are the two partner months. These can be used to take full advantage of the parental allowance and to share the care of the child for two months.