Statutory Neonatal Care Pay (SNCP) - desktop version

Matt Jennings Updated by Matt Jennings

To view the Statutory Neonatal Care Pay (SNCP) article for the web version, click HERE

Statutory Neonatal Care Pay (SNCP) is a new statutory payment available to employees from the start of the 2025/26 tax year. This allows employees whose babies (both birth and adopted) enter neonatal care to claim leave and pay.

Employees are entitled to 1 week of leave per week of neonatal care the child receives up to a maximum of 12 weeks.

To add SNCP for an employee, navigate to their record, and click the new SNCP button in the ribbon at the top.

From here you will presented with a form to fill out:

The top section is where you state whether the SNCP is linked to a birth or an adoption. You can also link to an employee's existing instance of SMP/SAP or SPP. By linking to one of these, the system will prepopulate some of the fields on the form.

On the employee tab, in order to save the record, entries are required for Date of birth of child, Start date of neonatal care and End date of neonatal care. As neonatal care is payable in one week increments, an initial week needs to be entered for it to be considered.

Once an initial end date is added, an extra tab is available where secondary instances of care can be entered, as long as all care start dates are within 28 days of the birth of the child. Each instance must be in full weeks as leave is payable in whole weeks only.

SNCP payment dates

Payment dates are the weeks that the employee is to be paid for. SNCP cannot be paid along with any other statutory payment, therefore the dates of leave may not correspond directly with the dates of care. For example, employees receiving SMP payments may take the SNCP leave at the end of their SMP.

If an employee requires payment whilst the baby is still in neonatal care, or the first week after, this is classed as tier one leave, and the notice period is before the employee is due to start work on the first day of leave or as soon as is reasonably possible, and multiple instances of tier one leave are permitted

If an employees payment date is after this period, it is classed as tier two leave and 15 days notice is required for one weeks payment or 28 days notice for 2 or more payment weeks.

To enter payment dates, click the SNCP payment dates tab and input the Notice date, Start date and End date of each instance of leave. To add extra instances, click in the row below the one entered and add the next set of dates.

To delete an entry, or to add an entry in between two that have already been entered simply click the grey left hand edge of the relevant row and select to either insert of delete entry.

Once entered clicking the OK button will update the record.

Entry can also be made from within Enter payroll details in exactly the same way

Was this article useful?

Contact