Under the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987, if an employee (or their partner) are:
having a baby or going to take the permanent primary responsibility for a child under six years,
and the employee has worked for any employer/s for at least an average of 10 hours a week for any 26 of the 52 weeks just before the baby’s due date or the date they become responsible for the child under the age of 6,
they may be eligible for a parental leave payment for up to 26 weeks. In addition, they may also be entitled to unpaid parental leave if they have worked for the same employer for an average of 10 hours a week for at least 6 months. Employees who have worked for the employer for at least 12 months or more have increased entitlements.
Things to note:
An employee can take annual holidays (or other paid leave) at the start of their parental leave and their parental leave payment period will start at the end of their holidays (or paid leave).
Time on parental leave is considered continuous service and taking parental leave does not affect entitlement to annual holidays and the employee is still entitled to four weeks each entitlement year. However, under the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987, the payment for the annual holidays that the employee becomes entitled to while on parental leave and in the 12-month period following their return is affected by parental leave.
The pay for those annual holidays is paid at the rate of the employee’s average weekly earnings over the 12 months before the annual holidays. Note that if the employee has previous entitlements they had not taken before going on parental leave, then the normal calculation for annual holidays applies to the use of these entitlements
Before making any changes to MicrOpay it is recommended that you decide how Parental Leave will be applied for your employees at your company.
Please find below some links that may provide a starting point to New Zealand Parental Leave.
Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment / Employment New Zealand
IRD
Download this Knowledgebase document for steps on how to set up this leave type up in MicrOpay:
Depending on the decisions made on how to apply Parental Leave not all the steps in the article may be necessary.