Checked against gov.uk: 6 September 2026
The grace period is a window that lets your child keep their funded place for a while after you stop meeting the eligibility criteria, rather than losing funded hours the moment your circumstances change. How long it lasts depends on when in the funding cycle you become ineligible.
The grace period exists for parents who lose their job, have their hours cut, or otherwise stop meeting the minimum income requirement, or the working requirement more broadly, after previously qualifying. It's designed to stop a sudden change in circumstances from pulling a child out of nursery overnight, giving the family time to get back into qualifying work.
This is where it's worth being precise, because it's not a flat number of days despite what you might read elsewhere. The Department for Education's statutory guidance ties the grace period to funding blocks, the periods running up to 31 March, 31 August and 31 December. If you become ineligible during the first half of a funding block, your grace period runs to the end of that block. If you become ineligible during the second half, it runs to the end of the following block instead. In practice, that means the exact number of weeks you get depends on when in the term your circumstances changed, not a fixed 30 or 90 days.
Say you're made redundant in early October, which falls in the first half of the block running to 31 December. Your grace period would run to the end of that block, 31 December, giving you around three months to find new work before funded hours stop. If the same redundancy happened in late November instead, in the second half of the same block, the grace period would extend into the following block, giving you longer.
If you're still not eligible by the end of your grace period, the working parent entitlement hours stop. If your child is 3 or 4, they don't lose funded childcare entirely, they still qualify for the universal 15 hours a week that's available regardless of parents' working status, just not the additional hours tied to working. If your child is younger than 3, the grace period ending can mean losing funded hours altogether until you requalify.
Don't assume the grace period is automatic in every system, check your childcare account to see whether it's been applied and what your specific end date is. If you find new work or your income recovers within the grace period, reapply as soon as you can rather than waiting for the deadline, since a fresh code needs to be valid before the next funding block starts to avoid any gap at all.
If you're weighing up whether a change in work is worth the risk to your funded hours, the back to work calculator can show the full picture, and the childcare cost calculator can show what a term at full price would cost if the grace period runs out before you requalify.