Checked against gov.uk: 15 August 2026
Your funded hours start at the beginning of the next term, not the moment you go back to work. Which term that is depends on when you get a valid eligibility code, and whether you get it before that term's application deadline.
Once you're back at work and meeting the minimum income requirement, you (and your partner, if you have one) apply through your childcare account on gov.uk. If you qualify, you usually get an 11-digit eligibility code within a few days, often within minutes. But getting the code doesn't switch funded hours on immediately. It only makes you eligible from the start of the next term.
Funded terms start in January, April and September. To get funded hours from the start of a given term, you need a valid code by the end of the month before it begins:
Miss the deadline for one term, and you wait for the next one, even if you only missed it by a few days.
Say you return to work in October and get your code straight away. The next term start is January, so there's a gap of two to three months where you're paying full childcare costs before funded hours begin. If you'd instead returned in early December and your code wasn't issued until 2 January, you'd miss the 31 December deadline entirely and have to wait until the April term, even though you only missed it by two days.
This term-start rule isn't specific to returning to work. It's the same mechanic that applies when a child turns 9 months old and becomes newly eligible by age. Whatever changes to make you eligible, a new job, a pay rise crossing the threshold, or your child reaching the right age, the funding itself only ever starts from the next term boundary, never mid-term.
Getting the code isn't a one-off step. Once your funded hours start, you have to reconfirm your details every three months to keep the code valid, still meeting the minimum income requirement and still within the right age band. If you miss a reconfirmation window, the code can lapse and your funded hours can stop, so it's worth treating the reminder emails from your childcare account as genuinely time-sensitive rather than something to deal with later.
Apply for your code as soon as your return-to-work date and income are confirmed, rather than waiting until you've actually started. If a deadline is close, even applying a few days earlier can be the difference between starting funded hours on time or waiting an entire extra term. It's worth applying with a comfortable margin, weeks rather than days, since codes can occasionally take longer than expected to come through.
Working out whether returning to work is worth it once you factor in this gap, plus tax, National Insurance and any Child Benefit charge, is exactly what the back to work calculator is for. Once you know your actual start date, the childcare cost calculator shows the month-by-month cost, including the unfunded gap before your first term starts.