The Maternity Benefit Act: What Employers Are Actually Required to Do

A pregnancy announcement lands in HR's inbox, and only then does someone go looking for what the Maternity Benefit Act actually requires of you as an employer. That is the most common order this happens in, and it is the wrong one. The Act does not only grant a woman employee paid time off around childbirth. It places a written-notice obligation on you at the point of hiring, restricts what you can do to her employment while she is on leave, and adds facility requirements once your establishment grows past a certain size. Treat any of this as something to work out only when a leave request actually lands on someone's desk, and you are handling a statutory obligation reactively, under time pressure, with an actual employee waiting on an answer. This guide walks through what the Act actually requires of you for FY 2026-27. Where a specific week-count, headcount threshold, or rupee figure is involved, we say so clearly and tell you to confirm it against the Act's current text rather than repeating a number that may already be out of date, because that is exactly the kind of detail a stale article gets wrong, and it matters enormously to the person relying on it.

The Core Entitlement: Paid Maternity Leave

At the centre of the Act sits a straightforward promise: a woman employee who meets its eligibility condition is entitled to leave with full pay around the birth of a child, split between a period before her expected delivery date and a period after it. Exactly how many weeks this runs to, how that period splits between before and after delivery, and how the entitlement changes for a third child, an adoptive mother, or a commissioning mother in a surrogacy arrangement, are all specifically defined in the Act, and each of these is its own figure rather than one number that covers every situation. These are precisely the kind of numbers that get misquoted: copied from an old HR handbook, inherited from a template offer letter, or lifted from an article that was accurate the year it was written and has quietly gone stale since. Confirm the current entitlement for each situation that actually applies to your workforce directly from the Act's current text, or with someone qualified to advise on it, before you put a figure in an appointment letter or a policy document.

• A period of paid leave split between before and after the expected delivery date, with the total and the split both fixed by the Act
• A separate, generally shorter entitlement once a woman already has two or more surviving children
• A separate entitlement for a woman adopting a child below a specified age, and for a commissioning mother in a surrogacy arrangement
• A minimum number of days a woman must have actually worked, within a defined period before her expected delivery date, before the paid entitlement applies at all

What is not in doubt is the underlying principle. This is paid leave, calculated on the salary the employee was actually drawing, not an unpaid absence and not a discretionary benefit you can scale back because business is slow or because someone joined recently. Get the eligibility condition and the entitlement itself confirmed for your situation, then apply it consistently rather than case by case.

Which Employers the Act Applies To

The Act does not apply from your first employee onward. It covers notified categories of establishments, factories, mines, plantations, and shops and establishments brought within its scope under the applicable state law among them, once headcount crosses a specified threshold. That threshold is set out in the Act, and it is worth confirming directly rather than assuming, because it is easy to confuse it with the separate, and different, headcount thresholds that trigger PF or ESI coverage. Those are different laws with their own trigger points, not interchangeable versions of the same number. As with those other thresholds, coverage is generally assessed establishment by establishment, so if you run more than one office, branch, or unit, check applicability for each one rather than assuming that being covered at head office extends automatically everywhere. If your headcount is growing, build this check into the same process you already use for PF and ESI thresholds, rather than treating it as a separate compliance area nobody owns.

The Crèche Facility Requirement

Establishments above a certain size carry an obligation that goes beyond granting leave: providing a crèche facility for the children of women employees, within a distance the Act or its rules prescribe, along with a defined number of visits a mother is permitted to make to it during her working hours. The employee-count threshold that triggers this obligation is materially higher than the threshold that triggers the Act's core leave provisions, which is exactly why some employers who correctly grant maternity leave still wrongly assume they are too small to owe a crèche as well. Confirm the current threshold rather than relying on memory or an old compliance checklist. Getting this wrong in either direction, assuming a facility is owed when it is not, or assuming it is not owed when headcount has actually crossed the line, creates its own problems. If your headcount is anywhere near a figure you recall for this requirement, treat that as a prompt to check the current rule properly, not as a rough guide to plan around.

Work From Home, Medical Bonus, and Protection During Leave

Once the leave period ends, the Act allows for an arrangement that is easy to misunderstand in both directions: an employer and employee may agree that she works from home for some time afterward, but only where the nature of her role genuinely permits remote work, and only where both sides actually agree to it. It is not a right an employee can invoke unilaterally, and it is not a substitute for leave that you can impose in its place. It is a mutual arrangement, available where the job realistically allows it, whether that is a role that never really required a desk in the first place, or a role that clearly needs someone physically present. Working out, in advance, which roles in your organisation could genuinely support this, and building that into policy before someone actually asks, turns a difficult on-the-spot negotiation into a conversation you were already prepared to have.

Where you do not provide free pre-natal and post-natal medical care to a woman entitled to maternity benefit, the Act requires you to pay a medical bonus instead. The amount is fixed by the Act and gets revised periodically, so treat any figure you have seen quoted for it, anywhere, as provisional until you check the current amount. Do not budget for it, or write it into a policy document, from memory.

Separately, and just as firmly, the Act restricts what you can do to a woman's employment while she is on maternity leave, or on account of her pregnancy. Dismissing her, or varying the conditions of her employment to her disadvantage, during this period is generally not permitted, and this protection is meant to be read broadly rather than narrowly. A demotion dressed up as a restructuring, a role change that conveniently happens the week leave is applied for, or a performance review that turns unusually critical once a pregnancy is announced, all sit inside the kind of conduct this provision exists to catch, whatever internal justification is offered for it.

The dispute that actually reaches a labour authority rarely starts with the childbirth itself. It usually starts months earlier, with a transfer, a role change, or a review that quietly worked against someone who was pregnant or about to go on leave.

Put This in Writing at Appointment, Not When Leave Is Requested

The Act places one more obligation on you that is easy to overlook entirely: informing every woman employee, in writing and electronically, of the maternity benefits she is entitled to under the Act, at the time she is appointed. This is not a courtesy you extend if you remember to. It is a statutory requirement, and plenty of employers only discover it was never actually done when a compliance review or a dispute forces them to check. If your appointment letters and offer templates do not currently carry this notice, close that gap now rather than at the next template refresh.

Every row in that table is a gap that is far cheaper to close in advance than to argue about after the fact. Building the following into onboarding and HR policy closes most of it:

• Add the Act's written notice of maternity benefits to your standard appointment letter and offer letter templates, not as a separate document that is easy to skip
• Maintain a documented, current summary of the leave entitlement, the eligibility condition, and how both change for a third child, adoption, or surrogacy, checked against the Act's current text rather than carried forward from an old policy
• Confirm your own establishment's headcount against both the core applicability threshold and the separate, higher crèche threshold, and revisit this check as headcount grows rather than only at initial registration
• Write a short, honest work-from-home policy for the post-leave period that identifies which roles could realistically support it, so the conversation with an employee is a genuine discussion rather than an improvised answer
• Train managers, not just HR, on the dismissal and disadvantage protections that apply during maternity leave, since the riskiest decisions are usually made by a line manager who has never read the Act
• Keep the medical bonus amount, and every other figure tied to this Act, on a checklist that gets revisited on a fixed schedule rather than trusted indefinitely once someone sets it
• Document every maternity-related decision, leave approval, role change, or review outcome, with a paper trail that would hold up if it were ever questioned later

None of this is complicated once it is written down. What actually creates exposure is doing it for the first time under pressure, with an employee waiting on an answer, instead of following a policy that already existed before anyone needed it.