The first thing most women do when they find out they're pregnant is start a list. Cot, pram, the right car seat, which hospital bag goes where. The money list comes later, usually around the time someone in HR sends a leaflet about statutory pay and you realise the numbers don't add up the way you assumed they would. Maternity leave in the UK is sold as a year off. For your bank account, it's closer to a year of running two households on the income of half of one.
Here's the part nobody frames clearly enough: the financial hit of having a baby isn't really the leave itself. Statutory Maternity Pay is what it is — 90% of your average weekly earnings for six weeks, then £187.18 a week (or 90% of earnings if that's lower) for the next 33 weeks as of the 2025/26 tax year. You can do the arithmetic on that and brace for it. The damage that creeps up on you is the part you don't plan for, because it doesn't show up on a payslip. It's the pension contributions that quietly stop. It's the salary band you don't re-enter at the same level. It's the three years of compounding you lose on a workplace pension that was finally starting to look like a real number.
The maternity penalty is mostly a pension problem
When you're on statutory maternity pay, your employer is legally required to keep paying their pension contributions as if you were on your full salary — that's the rule under the Equality Act, and it catches a lot of employers out, so check it. Your own contributions, though, are based on what you're actually being paid. So if you're auto-enrolled and contributing 5% of your salary, and your salary has dropped to £187 a week, your contribution drops with it. For the months you're on unpaid leave at the end, your contributions can stop entirely.
Take a woman earning £38,000 who takes the full year. On a standard auto-enrolment split, she'd normally put in roughly £1,520 of her own money across the year and her employer adds around £1,140. During maternity leave her own input might fall to a few hundred pounds. That gap looks small. But a pension is a compounding machine, and a £1,500 hole in your early thirties isn't a £1,500 problem by the time you're sixty — at a 5% real return over 28 years, it's closer to £6,000 of missing retirement money. Take two periods of leave and you're staring at a five-figure dent that you never see leave your account, because it never arrives in it.
What to actually do before you go on leave
The single most useful move is also the least glamorous: ask your payroll department, in writing, exactly how your pension contributions will be handled during each phase of your leave — full pay, statutory pay, and any unpaid stretch. Get the split in numbers. You'd be amazed how often the answer reveals that the employer contribution is being calculated on your reduced pay rather than your full salary, which is a mistake you can challenge.
If the household can stretch to it, keep your own pension contributions going at the pre-leave level during the statutory phase. You can usually arrange this directly with the provider or through payroll, and it means you don't lose your share of the compounding even while your salary is suppressed. This is the better choice for most women who can afford it, full stop — the return on filling that gap while it's small beats almost anything else you could do with the same money.
A few concrete steps worth taking in the three to six months before your leave starts:
- Build a maternity buffer that's separate from your normal emergency fund — most women I've watched do this well aim for the shortfall between their take-home pay and statutory pay, multiplied by the number of months they want to take. Park it somewhere it earns its keep.
- Move that buffer into an easy-access savings account paying a real rate. As of mid-2026 the better easy-access accounts from the likes of Chase, Chip and Atom Bank are still paying north of 4% AER, and a cash ISA shields the interest from tax if you're near your personal savings allowance.
- Check whether you qualify for enhanced occupational maternity pay rather than just statutory — plenty of women never read their own contract closely enough to find out.
- Use any salary sacrifice scheme still running before your pay drops, because once you're on statutory pay there's very little salary left to sacrifice from.
Don't forget the credits that protect your state pension
This is the bit that genuinely surprises people. Your state pension is built on National Insurance credits, and you need 35 qualifying years for the full new State Pension, which is £230.25 a week in 2025/26. While you're getting Child Benefit for a child under 12, you get NI credits automatically — even if you don't take the money. So if you or your partner earn over £60,000 and you've decided to opt out of receiving Child Benefit to dodge the High Income Child Benefit Charge, fill in the claim form anyway and tick the box to decline the payments. Opt out of the cash, not the credit. Women who skip the form entirely can end up with gaps in their state pension record that cost far more than the charge they were avoiding.
If you took time out before this rule was properly publicised, it's worth pulling your NI record on the gov.uk site to check for gaps. Specified Adult Childcare Credits also exist for grandparents who look after the children while a mother goes back to work — a quietly useful transfer that keeps a retired grandmother's pension record topped up.
The return-to-work negotiation is a money decision, not just a lifestyle one
Here's where the real long-term cost hides. The gender pay gap doesn't open up because women are paid less for the same job on day one — it widens after the first child, when many women come back part-time, take a less demanding role, or quietly stop being considered for the promotion track. Going part-time can be exactly the right call for your family. But treat it as a financial decision with a price tag attached, not a default you drift into because the childcare maths looked impossible that month.
Run the actual numbers on childcare against your salary before you assume you can't afford to go back full-time. The expansion of funded childcare hours in England — 30 funded hours for working parents of children from nine months old, fully in place from September 2025 — has changed that calculation for a lot of households. The catch is that "funded" doesn't mean free; many nurseries charge top-up fees for meals and extras, and the hours only stretch across term time unless you pay to spread them. Get a written quote from your actual nursery before you decide the sums don't work.
If you do go part-time, push for your pension contribution to stay as a percentage that reflects a fair share of the household's retirement saving, not just your own shrunken payslip. A couple where one partner's pension keeps growing on a full salary while the other's flatlines on three days a week is quietly building a retirement gap that only becomes visible if the relationship ends. That's not a comfortable thing to plan around. It's still cheaper than the alternative.
One number to write down today
Before any of the strategy, do one small thing: find out your current pension balance and your average monthly contribution, and write both down somewhere you'll see them. Most women going on maternity leave have no idea what either figure is, which makes it impossible to notice when one of them silently drops to zero. You can't protect a number you've never looked at.
The maternity penalty is real, and it's stubborn, and the official figures on the motherhood pay gap have barely shifted in a decade. But the version of it that hits your pension is the most fixable part — it responds to a written question to payroll, a buffer in a 4% account, a ticked box on a Child Benefit form. None of that is exciting. All of it is worth more than the pram.