Source: Yasmin Rufo, Business reporter, BBC News, “I asked my husband to pay into my pension when we had a child — here’s why”, published 11 September 2026. The tax mechanics below are taken from GOV.UK’s guidance on pension tax relief and employee rights when on leave, and Statutory Maternity Pay rates from GOV.UK. Household spending is from the ONS Family Spending bulletin, released 11 June 2026.
Our view, before the detail
The couple at the centre of this story did something sensible and slightly unusual: while Molly Haylett cut back at work to look after their first child and her career “took a step back”, her husband Taylor kept paying into her pension. Not his own instinct, either — she asked him to, and says every couple should have that conversation before the baby arrives, not after. What makes this more than one family’s nice arrangement is the research cited alongside it: Octopus Money found more than a third of parents reduced or paused pension contributions during parental leave, and 63% didn’t know their partner could contribute on their behalf at all. That second number is the real story. This isn’t a niche tax trick. It’s a standard, decades-old HMRC rule that most households taking exactly the kind of leave it was built for have simply never heard of.
What actually happens to a pension when the pay drops
Most workplace pension contributions are calculated as a percentage of what you’re actually paid in that pay period, so when your pay falls, your own contribution falls with it — automatically, without anyone deciding anything. Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) is paid for up to 39 weeks: 90% of average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, then £194.32 a week, or 90% of average earnings if that’s lower, for the next 33 weeks — the current rate, verified against GOV.UK today. Shared Parental Pay works the same way. After that, GOV.UK is direct about what happens next: “Pension contributions usually stop if a period of leave is unpaid, unless your contract says otherwise” — so once statutory pay runs out, contributions can stop completely rather than just shrink, and it depends entirely on what your own contract says, not on any general right.
Illustrative figures only, built on the SMP rates above and a standard 5% employee contribution. Average weekly earnings on £30,000 a year are £576.92. For the first six weeks of leave, SMP at 90% is £519.23 a week — close enough to normal pay that a 5% pension contribution barely moves.
From week seven, SMP drops to the £194.32 flat rate — a 66% cut in weekly pay. A 5% contribution on that is £9.72 a week, against £28.85 a week on full pay: a shortfall of £19.13 a week. Over the remaining 33 weeks of statutory pay, that’s £631.29 of contributions that simply don’t happen — before even counting what stops completely if leave runs unpaid beyond that.
The rule that plugs it: paying into someone else’s pension
Anyone can make what GOV.UK calls a third-party pension contribution into someone else’s registered pension — a partner, but it doesn’t have to be. For someone with no earnings in a tax year, up to £2,880 can be paid in, and because it goes into a relief-at-source scheme, the pension provider claims 20% basic-rate tax relief from HMRC and adds it — taking the pot up to £3,600 — regardless of whether the person the pension belongs to has paid a penny of tax that year. That £720 difference isn’t contingent on anything. It’s not means-tested, doesn’t need applying for beyond setting up the payment, and it’s the same mechanism that already tops up every basic-rate taxpayer’s own contributions — it simply also works when the earnings side of the equation is zero.
Illustrative figures. £2,880 across a year is £55.38 a week. Against the ONS’s latest measured average UK household spend of £676.60 a week (financial year ending 2025), that’s 8.2% of everything an average household spends — a real trade-off, not a rounding error, which is exactly why it’s worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
It also comfortably covers the £631.29 shortfall worked out above, with headroom left over — and adds £720 that wouldn’t exist without it. Most households topping up during one period of leave won’t use the full £2,880; the point is that the ceiling is high enough to matter, and the free top-up applies whether you use £200 of it or all of it.
What Katie Guild says to ask before the leave starts
Katie Guild, co-founder of the financial community Nugget Savings, told the BBC that the pension gap typically opens during maternity leave because contributions fall as pay falls, and can stop altogether during unpaid leave. Her advice is to have the conversation before the baby arrives, because it’s a much harder conversation once you’re sleep-deprived and adjusting to a newborn. She recommends couples work through a short set of questions together: whether the partner who keeps working could top up the other’s pension, what support is available through funded childcare hours and Tax-Free Childcare, and how the household will handle money as a joint position rather than a strict 50/50 split that stops making sense the moment one income drops. Molly Haylett makes the same point from the other side: she says she recently told a friend, hesitant to even raise it with her partner, that “you’ve got to just ask him” — because the person not asking is usually the one who loses out.
Three things to do this week
- Work out the real weekly numbers, not a guess. Use GOV.UK’s maternity and paternity calculator to see exactly what pay looks like week by week, including the drop after week six. Most couples underestimate how steep that particular cliff edge is.
- Ask payroll, in writing, what happens to pension contributions once pay drops and once it stops. Don’t assume — GOV.UK confirms contributions usually stop during unpaid leave unless the contract says otherwise, and contracts vary. This is a one-email question with a definite answer.
- If contributions will shrink or stop, decide together whether the working partner tops up. It can go into a personal pension in the other partner’s name, or the same workplace scheme if it accepts third-party payments. Set the standing order up before the pay drop lands, not after — it’s much easier to start a payment than to catch up a missed one later.
What is still uncertain
The BBC piece is a personal account, not a data release, so some things aren’t stated and we won’t guess at them: what Molly and Taylor actually earned during her leave, how much Taylor contributed on her behalf, or which pension provider was involved. What we do know, and have verified directly against GOV.UK today, is that the £2,880/£3,600 rule is real, current and not means-tested, and that the underlying research — a third of parents cutting contributions, 63% not knowing the fix exists — comes from Octopus Money as reported by the BBC. Whether more couples act on it now than before this story ran isn’t something anyone can measure yet.
If this has you wanting to look at what your own pension is actually doing, not just this one gap, our pension reality check covers the employer match and the twenty-minute annual MOT, and understand your payslip shows you where contributions actually appear. For the wider conversation about money as a couple rather than two separate incomes, money and relationships is the place to start. And if leave has already made money genuinely tight, free, independent help is available today from MoneyHelper, StepChange and National Debtline.