Working while pregnant

You are under no obligation to tell your employer the moment you find out. There is no legal deadline, and many people wait until after the first scan, somewhere between weeks 12 and 20. It is your news to share when you are ready.

There is one thing worth knowing: most of your protections only begin once your employer knows. Maternity protection (Mutterschutz) and the strong protection from dismissal both start when you tell them. So while there is no rush, telling them sooner is what switches the safeguards on. A short note in writing, naming your due date, is enough.

Maternity protection is the law that shields you around the birth. It applies to employees (and, in large part, to students and trainees), whatever your nationality. Its heart is a protected period when you do not work:

• Six weeks before your due date. This part is optional, and you may keep working if you wish and say so.
• Eight weeks after the birth. This part is required, for your protection, and your employer may not have you work during it.
• Twelve weeks after for a premature or multiple birth, or if your baby is later found to have a disability.

During this protected time you do not lose income. You receive maternity pay (Mutterschaftsgeld) from your health insurer, up to €13 a day, and your employer tops it up to your full average net salary (Arbeitgeberzuschuss). In practice, you are paid roughly what you earned before.

Germany has something many countries do not: a way to stop working during pregnancy, before the protected period begins, without losing pay and without it counting as sick leave. It is called an employment ban (Beschäftigungsverbot), and it comes in two forms.

A general ban (generelles Beschäftigungsverbot) applies when your specific work cannot be made safe for pregnancy: heavy lifting, night shifts, exposure to certain substances, standing for long stretches. Your employer must first try to adjust your role or move you; only if they cannot are you released from work.

An individual ban (individuelles Beschäftigungsverbot) is written by your doctor or midwife when continuing to work would risk your health or the pregnancy. It can be full or partial (for example, reduced hours, or no standing), and it can begin at any point in pregnancy.

Sometimes a pregnancy asks you to stop sooner than you imagined. Exhaustion, pain, bleeding, raised blood pressure, a threatened early labour, or simply a body that has had enough. If that is you, you have two routes, and they are different:

• An individual employment ban (Beschäftigungsverbot). When the issue is the pregnancy itself, this is usually the right route. Your doctor or midwife writes it, you keep your full salary, and your sick-leave entitlement stays intact for when you might need it later.
• Ordinary sick leave (Krankschreibung). When the issue is an illness that happens to coincide with pregnancy, you are signed off sick like anyone else, on sick pay.

If you are unsure which applies, ask your doctor or midwife to consider a Beschäftigungsverbot first. They decide on medical grounds, but it is always worth raising. Leaving work early in this way is common, legitimate, and nothing to apologise for.

If the unimaginable happens and you lose your baby, you are still protected. After a stillbirth the maternity-protection period and protection from dismissal still apply, and after a miscarriage you are signed off and cared for as you need. You can read more in our gentle note on loss and the stories it leaves.

From the day you are pregnant until at least four months after the birth, you have special protection from dismissal (Kündigungsschutz). Your employer cannot give you notice during this time, save for very rare cases that need official approval from the state authority. This protection holds whether you have been there ten years or ten weeks.

It also reaches back: if your employer did not know you were pregnant when they gave you notice, you can tell them within two weeks of receiving it, and the dismissal usually falls away. If you take parental leave (Elternzeit), the protection continues through it.

Your role is held for you. After your leave you return to the same job, or an equivalent one on the same terms. Time on maternity protection and parental leave does not cost you your position.

Two things sit just past the birth, and both have timing that rewards a little planning now.

Both parents can share Elternzeit, at the same time or in turn, and a few quiet weeks spent reading the rules before the birth makes the forms far easier afterwards. The full picture, including Kindergeld and Mutterschutz pay, lives in The German Maternity System.