My firm prorates hours and bonus amounts. When you talk to HR about the dates of your leave they print you out a page that gives you your new prorated hours targets for the year (or both years, if ML straddles two calendar years). Billing minimum is 2100 here, but if you bill 2200, 2300, 2400 you get a bump. Those increases are still taken into account on a ML year, and IMO actually make more sense to aim for then than a regular year. If you're working 12 months the juice isn't worth the squeeze of billing an extra 100 for a fairly nominal increase in bonus, but if it's only an extra 42 hours, that's just a couple of crappy weeks.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, was the target you hit the same target you would have had in a typical year, or was the target reduced because of maternity leave?

I hit the reduced target of 1300 and change, instead of 2000. But even given this, I don’t understand why my bonus is so low.

So you got 100% of the bonus for the work you did. That seems fair.
I'm not a lawyer, but I work part time and my bonus is always prorated for the percentage I work. One year a manager tried to lower the base bonus that the percentage is based off of "because I was part time" and that really pissed me off. (Fortunately, my line managers stepped in and fixed it quickly)

My (large) firm only pro-rates bonuses for the portion of maternity leave you take as unpaid. We get 16 weeks paid, but you can easily take a certain amount of time unpaid after that - so I guess essentially they count the paid leave time as time "worked" still for purposes of bonus? I took 16 weeks of paid leave in 2020 and about 6 weeks unpaid, so my bonus was reduced but only by about 10%. For hours target, they only looked at the months I actually worked and determined that I was more or less on target.

Anonymous wrote:Firms that pay a lockstep bonus without an hours requirement also pay the full bonus when you’re on maternity leave.

This. I took full six months of maternity leave and was actually shocked to get the full bonus.

Anonymous wrote:Firms that pay a lockstep bonus without an hours requirement also pay the full bonus when you’re on maternity leave.

That’s not a bonus, that’s deferred comp.