Employment

[Bluelady-sing]

A friend of mine was asking if she starts a job, suspecting she might be pregnant when does she have to tell employer

[Seb9]

No she doesn't have to before she starts working for them, she doesn't legally have to tell them until 15 weeks before the baby is due.A lot of people tell work earlier than that so they can do the risk assessment for you so that if there's anything you do that could be a risk to your pregnancy they can remove, like working with chemicals, heavy lifting etc. Especially with covid around it's quite important that they risk assess this too and make sure you're able to keep to social distancing, mask wearing guidance as pregnant woman are more vulnerable.

If they start a new job while pregnant though they won't be entitled to statutory maternity pay as you need to be working for your current employer for a period of time before your pregnant to qualify, so she might only be able to get maternity allowance if she qualified for that so it's worth checking that before she takes a new job as she could miss out as SMP normally is better than maternity allowance and her current job might have a good maternity policy in place.

[Bluelady-sing in reply to Seb9]

Thanks this is very helpful