Minimum NCS subsidy increase

As previously communicated, from 2 January 2023, the minimum rate for NCS subsidies will increase from €0.50 to €1.40. The increase, which was introduced by Minister Roderic O’Gorman as part of Budget 2023 measures, means that if parents are in receipt of a subsidy which is less than the maximum, they will receive a higher subsidy towards their childcare fees.

Awards were recalculated with this new rate and updated accordingly. This affects existing claims. Service providers do not need to modify the claim if the hours are remaining the same. However, service providers will have to recalculate co-payment and issue new parental agreements. To help service with additional admin work the Department agreed that services have two months to create and sign new Parental Agreement. Therefore the deadline for new parental agreements for uplifted claims is 02/03/2023.

Identifying affected claims

The uplift process has been completed and to assist with identifying which NCS claims in your service have been impacted, a new page called ‘Budget 2023 Claims affected’ is available on the Early Years Hive . This page is under the Registration menu on Hive and it display the claims that will change during the uplift process.

Please see the how-to guide here for more information on this new page.

Parental agreement

To assist with this additional administrative work, Pobal developed new semi-automated Parental Agreement. This new feature will be available on the ‘Parental Agreement and Co-payment” section of NCS claims on the NCS registrations page later next week. Once you have calculated the co-payment for an NCS claim, the Parental Agreement will include all co-payment weekly amounts, the child’s name, the claim to and from date etc. this will be available to download and print from this page. Further information on this new feature will be available later next week.

Please see the how-to guide here for more information on the Parental Agreement.