Parental Leave

What is Parental Leave?

Parental leave is an unpaid break from work for mothers and fathers who want to personally care for and raise their child. As an employee, you can request parental leave from Smart. During parental leave, Smart must grant you up to 3 years off work per child. During this time, you do not need to work and will not receive a salary. As compensation, you can, for example, apply for parental allowance.

Good to Know:

• Each parent can take parental leave.
• You do not necessarily have to apply for parental allowance to take parental leave.
• Parental leave allows you to reduce your work hours to 0% while remaining health insured.
• You can take up to 3 years of parental leave per child.

Please note that during parental leave, you may not be employed at all, or at most 30 hours per week (part-time during parental leave).

Parental Leave and Smart

The key information:

• For health insurance (and other social insurances), no money is deducted from your budget.
• During parental leave, you CANNOT process assignments and will not receive a salary. You can only do this if you work part-time.
• If you decide to work part-time and receive parental allowance (Elterngeld Plus), your assignments should not exceed your employment/allowance ratio. For example, if you have a part-time contract of EUR 1200 net per month and receive EUR 520 Parental Allowance Plus per month, you should not invoice more than approximately EUR 2200 per month through Smart.
• You can, for instance, plan three parental leave periods with a 0 EUR salary and include phases in between in which you pay yourself a salary (from existing/accumulated budget). For this, we need exact information about the amounts of your assignments.

Applying for Parental Leave

Please inform us via email that you would like to go on parental leave. We will send you the application for parental leave by email. Please register your parental leave in good time: at least 7 weeks before the start of parental leave.