Can I be made redundant while on maternity leave?
Short answer
Only with enhanced protection. Your employer cannot select you because you are on maternity leave, and if your role becomes redundant during leave you have priority over other at-risk employees for any suitable alternative vacancy. Breaching that priority is automatically unfair dismissal and potentially sex discrimination.
Maternity leave does not make you immune from a genuine redundancy — if the business closes or the need for your kind of work disappears, you can be included. But the law gives you significantly stronger protection than colleagues who are not on family leave.
Your enhanced protection
- Selection: your employer cannot use your maternity absence, or anything connected with it, as a selection criterion. Selection because of pregnancy or maternity is automatically unfair and sex discrimination, with no qualifying period of service needed to claim.
- Priority for alternatives: if your role becomes redundant while you are on maternity (or adoption or shared parental) leave, you have a priority right to be offered any suitable alternative vacancy ahead of other at-risk employees — not just to compete for it.
- Consultation: you must still be meaningfully consulted, even while on leave. Being left out of the process because you are away is itself evidence of unfairness.
Tribunals treat redundancy during or shortly after maternity leave very seriously, and a flawed process can support both an unfair dismissal claim and a discrimination claim.
Your money if the redundancy goes ahead
If the redundancy is genuine and fair, you keep your normal entitlements: statutory redundancy pay if you have at least two years' continuous service — calculated from your age, service (capped at 20 years) and weekly pay capped at £751 (from April 2026) — plus your full notice entitlement. Redundancy pay is tax-free up to £30,000. Use our statutory redundancy pay calculator to check the figure.
If you believe your selection was connected to your pregnancy or leave, act quickly: gather the selection criteria and pool documents, appeal internally, and notify Acas for Early Conciliation within three months less one day of dismissal. If you were denied a suitable alternative vacancy that went to someone else, that breach of the priority right makes the dismissal automatically unfair regardless of your length of service.
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