Maternity Benefit & Leave Timeline Calculator (Ireland)
Work out your weekly Maternity Benefit (2026 rate, Budget 2027 rise), lay out your paid and unpaid leave weeks on a timeline, and see how Revenue taxes the benefit and how an employer top-up works.
Calculator
EXAMPLE On leave (2026 rates): €299.00/week from the Department of Social Protection — before income tax, and no USC or PRSI is charged on it. Working: €595.51/week from the employer, after all deductions — not like-for-like. Swap in your own numbers in the form.
In plain terms: Maternity Benefit, Paternity Benefit and Parent's Benefit are weekly payments from the Department of Social Protection during statutory leave — a flat rate per week, regardless of salary. They are liable to income tax but never to USC (Universal Social Charge — a separate charge on income with its own bands) or PRSI (Pay Related Social Insurance — the weekly social-insurance charge that builds entitlement to the State Pension and to benefits like these), and how that income tax actually gets collected is the part this calculator maps out, week by week.
EXAMPLEExample money in hand during Maternity Benefit leave (26 weeks, State benefit only, 2026 rates) — prefilled numbers, swap in your own in the form
€299.00 per leave week
All of it is Maternity Benefit from the Department of Social Protection, paid with no income tax, USC or PRSI taken off it — so this is not an after-tax figure. The benefit is still liable to income tax: Revenue collects it later by cutting the example's rate band and credits — see “How the benefit is taxed”.
€296.51 (49.8%) less than the example's normal €595.51 week, which is after all deductions. Weekly figures vary slightly across the 2026 PRSI rate periods — exact figures in the table. Assumes the example employee qualifies for the benefit — see the notes.
This timeline covers paid weeks only. Maternity Benefit is paid for at most 26 weeks. Irish law allows a further 16 weeks of additional maternity leave immediately after the paid weeks. No Maternity Benefit is paid for those 16 weeks, and an employer does not have to pay for them either. Those weeks are not counted in the chart, the table or the totals here. The official Maternity Benefit page sets out the full leave entitlement.
Week commencing (dd/mm) — dashed line = normal week €595.51 — † = week starts after 31/12/2026, priced at 2026 rates (the Budget 2027 rate is under the totals)
Over the 26 leave weeks: €7,774.00 (€7,774.00 State benefit, with nothing deducted from the benefit itself). Working those weeks instead: €15,460.16 after all deductions — the example employee would have €7,686.16 (49.7%) less on leave. (The working-weeks figure prices each week at its own date — the 2026 PRSI rate change means it can differ slightly from the example's normal week × 26.)
Checking against a payslip: depending on the employer's arrangement, the Benefit may be paid to the employee directly or routed through payroll — so a payslip may show one combined amount rather than this table's benefit/top-up split. The number to compare is the weekly take-home here against what actually lands in the employee's account for that week.
Week-by-week breakdown
| Week commencing | Week | Take-home | State benefit | Employer pay | Income tax | USC | PRSI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 24/08/2026 | Normal | €595.51 | — | €700.00 | −€63.07 | −€12.02 | −€29.40 |
| 31/08/2026 | Normal | €595.51 | — | €700.00 | −€63.07 | −€12.02 | −€29.40 |
| 07/09/2026 | Leave 1 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 14/09/2026 | Leave 2 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 21/09/2026 | Leave 3 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 28/09/2026 | Leave 4 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 05/10/2026 | Leave 5 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 12/10/2026 | Leave 6 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 19/10/2026 | Leave 7 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 26/10/2026 | Leave 8 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 02/11/2026 | Leave 9 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 09/11/2026 | Leave 10 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 16/11/2026 | Leave 11 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 23/11/2026 | Leave 12 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 30/11/2026 | Leave 13 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 07/12/2026 | Leave 14 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 14/12/2026 | Leave 15 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 21/12/2026 | Leave 16 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 28/12/2026 | Leave 17 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 04/01/2027 † | Leave 18 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 11/01/2027 † | Leave 19 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 18/01/2027 † | Leave 20 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 25/01/2027 † | Leave 21 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 01/02/2027 † | Leave 22 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 08/02/2027 † | Leave 23 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 15/02/2027 † | Leave 24 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 22/02/2027 † | Leave 25 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 01/03/2027 † | Leave 26 | €299.00 | €299.00 | — | — | — | — |
| 08/03/2027 † ‡ | Normal | €594.46 | — | €700.00 | −€63.07 | −€12.02 | −€30.45 |
| 15/03/2027 † | Normal | €594.46 | — | €700.00 | −€63.07 | −€12.02 | −€30.45 |
USC = Universal Social Charge. PRSI = Pay Related Social Insurance. Neither is charged on the State benefit.
‡ Assumption, not a rule: the timeline puts the return to work in the week after the last paid week. Statutory leave can run longer than the paid weeks, and no Maternity Benefit is paid for those extra weeks — they are not in this table.
† Week starts after 31/12/2026 — priced at 2026 rates; Budget 2027 announced €309.00 a week from January 2027, subject to the Social Welfare Bill (see under the totals).
How the benefit is taxed — the part everyone gets wrong
Maternity Benefit is paid to the employee by the Department of Social Protection without any tax taken off, and it never has USC or PRSI charged on it. But it is liable to income tax. Revenue collects that tax by squeezing the example's payroll numbers, not the benefit itself:
- The example's weekly benefit is annualised: €299.00 × 52 = €15,548.
- The example's standard-rate band — the slice of income taxed at the standard rate, which a tax certificate may call the cut-off point — drops by that amount: €44,000 → €28,452.
- The example's tax credits drop by 20% of it (whole euro): €4,000 − €3,109 = €891.
- With no employer pay during leave there is nothing to deduct the benefit's tax from each week. Revenue collects any income tax due separately — for example through an adjusted tax credit certificate or the end-of-year review. That later collection sits outside this timeline: every week above, including the normal weeks after the example's leave, shows the cash for that week at its own payroll numbers.
Assumptions and notes
- PRSI qualification is assumed. This calculator assumes the example employee meets the PRSI contribution conditions for Maternity Benefit (broadly: enough recent PRSI-insurable weeks — the exact conditions are on the official Maternity Benefit page). Those conditions look at contributions already made — they are separate from any €0.00 PRSI weeks that may appear in the table below (see the PRSI note).
- Weeks marked † start after 31/12/2026 and are priced at 2026 rates here — the benefit and the tax on any pay. Budget 2027 announced a 2027 benefit rate of €309.00 a week, subject to the Social Welfare Bill; what that adds is under “Budget 2027” below the totals.
- Figures use the example's band and credits from the Advanced section (defaults: single person) and assume PRSI Class A employment, standard USC bands (no age-related reduced rates, no full-medical-card rate) and no pension contribution. Each week is priced as if annualised, the same frame payroll software uses for a week-1 basis; a cumulative payroll can smooth cents differently.
- The income tax due on the benefit itself (if any) is not shown as a weekly deduction anywhere in this timeline — Revenue collects it separately. See “How the benefit is taxed” above.
- Paid weeks only. Maternity Benefit is paid for at most 26 weeks and this timeline stops there. Irish law allows a further 16 weeks of additional maternity leave immediately after the paid weeks. No Maternity Benefit is paid for those 16 weeks, and an employer does not have to pay for them either. That entitlement is set out in Maternity Protection Act 1994 (Revised), section 14(1)(a). The return to normal pay marked ‡ in the table assumes the return to work happens the week after the last paid week. The official Maternity Benefit page sets out the leave entitlement, and an employer's own policy may add to it.
- One parent, one timeline: combining both parents' leave (or splitting Parent's Benefit blocks between parents) is outside this version.
Estimates only — not professional advice.
How this calculator works
The State benefit is a flat 2026 rate per week for a statutory number of weeks per leave type (Maternity Benefit: 26 weeks / Paternity Benefit: 2 weeks / Parent's Benefit: 9 weeks) . The benefit is liable to income tax but not USC or PRSI. Revenue collects that income tax through your payroll numbers: the weekly benefit is annualised (× 52), your standard-rate band drops by that amount, and your tax credits drop by 20% of it — so any employer top-up is taxed through squeezed numbers while the benefit itself arrives untouched. This calculator prices every week of your leave (and the normal weeks around it) with that mechanism, using PRSI Class A rates for the week's actual date — including the 2026 mid-year PRSI change. Every rate is read from a versioned data file assembled from the official publications below, and the engine must reproduce Revenue's published worked examples in its test suite before any deploy.
Sources
Key official sources for the figures on this page — the Sources page lists every statutory value with its effective and retrieval dates.