🇳🇱 Netherlands · 🇮🇳 India
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
The Netherlands offers new mothers 16 weeks of fully paid leave and new partners up to 15 weeks of combined birth and parental leave, most of it paid, in the child's first year. India offers new mothers 26 weeks of paid leave — 10 weeks longer than the Dutch figure — and yet research on India's 2017 maternity leave expansion found that some employers responded by quietly reducing hiring and wages for women of childbearing age. More leave, it turns out, is not automatically a more generous system. Sometimes it's just a bigger number for employers to price around.
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| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Register for daycare (kinderdagverblijf) as early as possible — waitlists run up to six months | Assume childcare is automatically cheap — the 96% subsidy only applies under roughly €56k household income |
| Have your partner claim the full 6 weeks of birth leave plus 9 weeks of parental leave | Assume freelance or self-employed partners get paid leave — ZZPers must self-fund it entirely |
| Ask your employer whether it tops up the 70% UWV-paid weeks to full salary | Skip planning parental leave timing — the paid 9 weeks must be used within the child's first year |
| Consider a parent-run crèche (ouderparticipatiecrèche) for lower fees if you have flexibility | Assume it's culturally unusual for fathers to take extended leave — usage is normalized, if inconsistently used |
| Budget for daycare hours that mirror a full working day (up to 10 hrs) | Assume international daycare spots are as available as standard Dutch crèches — they fill faster |
| ✅ Do | ❌ Don't |
|---|---|
| Confirm your employer provides the legally required crèche or crèche allowance (50+ employee threshold) | Assume paternity leave is standard — only 14% of private companies offer a formal policy |
| Understand your 26-week entitlement applies to your first two children only (12 weeks from the third) | Assume the law protects your job security and promotion trajectory equally — the "motherhood penalty" is well documented |
| Discuss return-to-work flexibility and part-time options before you go on leave | Assume employers absorb the cost of leave neutrally — some have historically adjusted hiring patterns around it |
| Negotiate remote or hybrid arrangements explicitly if returning from leave | Expect informal workplace support to substitute for a lack of statutory paternity leave |
| Watch for the aftermath of the March 2026 Supreme Court comments — paternity leave law may be coming | Assume a single national policy applies uniformly — enforcement and culture vary sharply by employer and sector |
Dutch parental leave policy is, structurally, one of the more balanced systems in Europe. Mothers receive a minimum of 16 weeks of paid leave via the UWV at up to 100 percent of daily wage. Partners get a full week at 100 percent pay within the first four weeks, plus up to five more supplementary weeks and nine weeks of parental leave at 70 percent pay, for a combined 15 weeks of partially or fully compensated time in the child's first year. Every employee with a child under 8 has a statutory right to unpaid parental leave beyond that, calculated as 26 times their weekly hours per child.
The catch is uptake, not entitlement. Research cited by Dutch labor commentators found that almost 30 percent of fathers return to work within a week of the birth despite their leave entitlement, and a quarter of parents don't consider paternity leave especially important — even though three-quarters describe it as valuable once taken. Childcare itself is heavily subsidized (rates as low as €63/month for households under roughly €56,000 income, against a base rate of €11.23/hour), but demand outstrips supply badly enough that waitlists for daycare spots can run up to six months, meaning the subsidy is only as useful as your ability to actually get a spot.
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India's statutory maternity leave, governed by the Code on Social Security 2020 (effective 21 November 2025), guarantees 26 weeks of paid leave for a first or second child and 12 weeks from a third, extending coverage to permanent, temporary, contractual, adoptive, and gig workers, with crèche facilities or allowances mandated at workplaces of 50 or more employees. On its face, this is one of the longer statutory maternity entitlements globally, well beyond the Netherlands' 16 weeks.
The complication is that the cost of this leave falls on the employer, and research into India's 2017 leave expansion found a documented behavioral response: some firms responded to increased leave costs by reducing hiring and wages for women in high-fertility age brackets — the textbook "motherhood penalty" playing out at a policy level. Paternity leave, meanwhile, remains almost entirely voluntary: only 14 percent of private Indian companies have a formal policy, and in March 2026 the Supreme Court explicitly called out the absence of a statutory paternity leave framework, suggesting reform may be coming but isn't here yet. Hofstede's data shows India scoring high on Power Distance (77) against the Netherlands' notably low score (38), and India's comparatively higher Masculinity score (56) against the Netherlands' famously low one (14) — a cultural backdrop in which caregiving roles remain more gendered by default, statute notwithstanding.
The paradox is that India's headline maternity benefit is more generous by the week than the Netherlands', and yet the Dutch system does more, structurally, to normalize shared parenting — the Netherlands legally requires a paid role for partners, however underused; India has no equivalent statutory expectation for fathers at all. Meanwhile, the Dutch system's real bottleneck isn't law but capacity: excellent leave policy meeting an undersupplied daycare market. India's bottleneck is enforcement and incentive: a genuinely long leave meeting an employer base that, evidence suggests, sometimes prices women out rather than absorbs the cost. Longer leave on paper does not mean less career risk in practice — if anything, in India's case, it may have created more.
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Quora — A father in the Netherlands described taking his full 6 weeks of birth leave without hesitation but noted most of his male colleagues quietly compressed theirs into the minimum, treating the extended weeks as technically available but professionally risky to actually use in full.
Expat Focus (Netherlands expat community) — A newcomer family recounted joining a daycare waitlist the week they landed and still waiting nearly five months for a spot, calling the subsidy "meaningless" until the placement actually came through, and recommending anyone relocating register before the job even starts.
iamexpat.nl — An expat parent's account described choosing a parent-run crèche specifically to skip the standard waitlist, trading lower fees and a shorter queue for a rotating duty to help care for other families' children — a tradeoff rarely mentioned in official guides.
Research commentary (ideasforindia.in, on India's 2017 leave law) — Analysts documented that firms facing the new 26-week maternity cost responded by adjusting hiring and wage patterns for women in the affected age bracket, effectively shifting the policy's financial burden back onto the workforce it was designed to protect.
If you're moving to the Netherlands to raise a child, the leave policy will treat you fairly — your bottleneck is the daycare waitlist, so register absurdly early. If you're moving to India, the maternity leave law reads generously, but ask directly, before you accept the offer, how the company actually treats women returning from leave and whether paternity leave exists in practice, not just on the employee handbook's cover page. The honest version for a friend: in the Netherlands, put your name on three waitlists before you've unpacked. In India, read the room, not just the statute.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.