The Vienna Institute of Demography launches the European Parenting Leave Policies (EPLP) Dataset. It brings together harmonised data on maternity, co-parent, paid parental, and job-protected leave regulations across 21 European countries from 1970 to 2024. These policies shape how long birth mothers and co-parents can be away from paid work around childbirth, and how leave can be shared between them – with implications for employment, fertility, and gender equality.
Developed by a network of 30 researchers and national experts, the project systematically collects statutory regulations from national legal texts, government publications, and secondary literature. Each country file has undergone detailed expert validation to ensure consistency and comparability.
The dataset includes 33 harmonised variables, capturing:
- Mandatory and voluntary maternity leave duration before and after birth
- Co-parent leave duration, including “daddy months”
- Paid parental leave duration and benefits
- Job-protected leave duration
- Additional information on flexibility, part-time leave, and incentives for parents to share entitlements — a key feature of recent gender-equality reforms
Because it reports annual data over more than five decades, the EPLP Dataset allows users to trace the historical expansion of leave systems since the 1970s, the introduction of parental leave in the 1980s and 1990s, and the more focus on leave for co-parents. By taking an individual perspective, the dataset enables direct comparisons of how much time each parent — not families collectively — can spend away from paid work, and how leave can be divided between parents.
The release also comes with extensive documentation, including a full codebook, harmonisation rules, detailed definitions, and country-specific reform timelines summarising key legislative changes between 1970 and 2024.
For researchers, policymakers, and analysts, the EPLP dataset opens new avenues for comparative work on the design and generosity of leave systems, the effects of major reforms, and the study of how policy change affects family dynamics.
The data are openly accessible on Zenodo under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
Learn more about it here.