How to claim for maternity benefits without worrying
Claiming for maternity UIF benefits successfully will require that you equip yourself with information.
According to the government of South Africa, as an employed female contributor to the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), you can apply for maternity benefits when you go on maternity leave.
To qualify for the benefits, you must be receiving less than your normal wages while you are on maternity leave.
Read more:Â All your maternity leave questions answered
As if moms do not have enough to deal with during the nine months of pregnancy, often one of the other major stressors is planning for maternity leave and applying for maternity UIF benefits as part of this.
Many women who have gone through this process have experienced frustration with the delays caused by the system’s bureaucracy.
Take these steps to ensure to make this process easier:
Who can claim?
You must be a South African citizen and have a bar-coded ID book. Moms, who pay UIF every month, can claim UIF maternity benefits, from the Department of Labour for four months.
Self-employed individuals, who are members of a closed corporation or a company, may claim maternity UIF. If you are adopting a child under the age of two years, you may also claim maternity UIF. Foreign nationals with a valid passport who fulfill all other UIF criteria may also claim.
Create a UIF maternity claim folder on your desktop:
This folder becomes the singular place where you save all the documents you have filled out, scanned and submitted as part of your claim. Having all submitted documents on hand will come in handy should you later on be told you need to resubmit one or two of them.
Call the UIF to check your employment history:
The money you receive from the UIF when you are on maternity leave is a reimbursement of the money that your employer deducts from your salary toward UIF insurance each month. Over the years if you have worked for different employers, they would have been deducting the money from your salary and would appear on the Department of Labour’s records as a UIF contributor under your profile.
Also read:Â Should you use an agency to claim maternity UIF?
Before you submit your claim, call the department and check that the employment record they have for you is up to date. Then ensure that each employer they have listed on the system under your name completes a UI.19 form for you. This is because if they were a contributor, part of your maternity monies would be from contributions made while you worked for them.
Get your claim documents together:
Before workers can claim, they must get the following documents ready:
- A 13-digit bar-coded identity document or passport.
- Copies of your last six payslips
- Form UI-2.8 for banking details.
- Information supplied by your employer (UI-19).
- A service certificate from the employer.
- Proof of your banking details.
- A statement of the amount received from the employer during maternity leave.
- Form UI-2.7.
- Form UI-2.3 (application form).
- Medical certificate from a doctor or birth certificate of the baby.
- Form UI-4 (follow-up form).
- Fully completed registration form.
Submit your claim:
Submit all the required documents on the day that your maternity leave starts. You cannot submit it before that, as the Department of Labour will not take it. You can submit it online at Ufiling.co.za or go to your nearest Labour Centre. Once successful your claim should be paid out within 6-8 weeks of your application.
Ensure that you follow up on the status of your claim. This will ensure that you know if any issues may be preventing your claim from moving forward.
How long will it take you to get paid?
You can claim UIF benefits for a maximum of 121 days (four months). If you have been contributing to UIF for the past four years, you are entitled to four months of UIF maternity leave.
For every six months worked, you can claim one month of UIF maternity benefits from the Department of Labour. The UIF uses the last four years of your employment records to calculate the number of credit days you have.
You can only claim for the time you are actually on maternity leave i.e. if you take two months of maternity leave, you can only claim two months of UIF maternity benefits. The department does, on occasion pay the entire four months, in one or two payments.
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