Breastfeeding and work: the right to take nursing breaks and get paid for them

How long are your breastfeeding breaks if you work in Tanzania and how long can you take them after your child’s birth, if you live in Vietnam? A global snapshot of national laws from our Labour Law Database

5 August 2026

‘Do I have the right to take breastfeeding breaks?’ It depends on where you live

It's 10:15 a.m., and Maria is doing the math again. If she takes twenty minutes now and another twenty after lunch, she should be able to express her milk without affecting her working schedule too much. In the Philippines, employed women are legally entitled to daily breaks of up to 40 minutes for breastfeeding at work. A lactation room has been set up at her textile factory where Maria can express milk.

Maria can say she is lucky. It’s true that women have it easier in other countries: Anna, 31, works in an office in Iași, Romania, and she can take two paid hours a day to breastfeed, protected by law, until one year after her child’s birth. But things could have been more difficult, too: Sana is a 27-year-old nurse who lives in Lahore, Pakistan, and has just had her first child. She stayed at home with him for almost three months, but now she is not granted any breaks for breastfeeding at all. As well as feeling guilty about leaving her baby with her mother to go back to work, she also knows that she won't be able to breastfeed him as much as she would have liked.

Different names, different countries, but it's the story of a legal landscape that varies more than most people realise. Across the world, the right to breastfeed at work is still a patchwork of protections, and mothers bear the cost, both in terms of time and money.

International standards for breastfeeding and work

When maternity leave ends, motherhood doesn’t. Breastfeeding can significantly contribute to babies' health, but mothers who return to work are still looking for consistent and effective support. This is the focus of the 2026 campaign for World Breastfeeding Week (1-7 August) which is championed by the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, Ministries of Health, and civil society partners.

If we look at the international standards, the World Health Organisation recognises that breastfeeding at work is a core component of maternity protection. This is particularly important since “duration of leave entitlements generally is shorter than the WHO recommended duration of exclusive and continued breastfeeding.”

The ILO Convention No.183 (2000) also aligns with the World Health Organisation by stating, in Article 10, that “women shall have the right to one or more daily breaks or a daily reduction of hours of work for breastfeeding.” The length of the breaks and the duration of the entitlement after childbirth is left to the discretion of each country's laws. Additionally, “these breaks or the reduction of daily hours of work shall be counted as working time and remunerated accordingly.” Worth mentioning is the accompanying Recommendation No. 191, which includes some additional measures, like, where practicable, “the establishment of facilities for nursing under adequate hygienic conditions at or near the workplace.”

The international standards for breastfeeding at work appear to follow a clear direction. What about national laws?

Legal protections for breastfeeding vary widely, and strength can mean different things. (Source: Labour Rights Index - WageIndicator - Accessed in July 2026)

Breastfeeding and work: national laws in a field full of contradictions

Millions of working mothers return to their jobs each year while still breastfeeding. The laws protecting their right to do so differ depending on where they live, as shown by the WageIndicator Labour Law database. Most notably, the right to benefit from breastfeeding breaks doesn’t always go hand in hand with other maternity rights, like a reasonable period of maternity leave to breastfeed at home or the right to return to the same position. Rights that would make it easier for mothers to keep breastfeeding and not be forced to decide between a paycheck and their children’s health.

Breastfeeding and work in Africa: 60 minutes is the standard, but some countries still don't provide any rights

An overview from our database shows that the African continent has a near uniform 60-minute daily breastfeeding break standard (80% of the countries), with a small handful of outliers: Cabo Verde, Burkina Faso, and Tanzania differ in duration, and offer daily breaks respectively of 45, 90, and 120 minutes. Gabon also provides working mothers with the right to 120-minute nursing breaks every day for the first 6 months and a 60-minute break for the next three months. The differences are not clustered, but scattered across regions, so they seem to be linked to isolated policy gaps rather than a regional trend: countries range from those that legally offer breastfeeding entitlements for six months after childbirth, like Burundi or South Africa, to those that grant the same right for up to the child's second birthday, like Egypt and Sudan. Algeria, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Uganda provide no legal right to breaks at all.

Breastfeeding is not a simple matter of biology: it’s a matter of time, and time in the workplace is money.

Breastfeeding and work in Latin America and Europe: differences and paradoxes

Looking at the Latin American countries, the daily breastfeeding break provision ranges from 30 minutes in Nicaragua to 90 minutes in Paraguay, and from 6 months in Paraguay to 24 months in Chile, which stands out with the most generous protection.
Contradictions emerge within the same country, though: Chile doesn’t legally mandate the right to return to the same position after maternity leave, creating a paradox where employees enjoy the longest breastfeeding break provision, but face the highest level of job insecurity upon their return.

A similar phenomenon can be observed across Europe:

Most European countries in our Labour Law database provide working mothers with both the right to return the same position and to take breaks to breastfeed or express their milk.
At the same time in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Germany, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Slovenia the law does not guarantee the right to return to the same position after maternity leave, while granting breastfeeding breaks.
On the other hand, mothers returning to work in Denmark and Malta are legally entitled to the same position, but not to breastfeeding breaks.

Breastfeeding breaks and maternity leave: two sides of the same coin

After the key question, “Are mothers in a certain country granted the right to breastfeeding breaks”, some others should follow: how long after their child's birth are these breaks granted, and do breastfeeding breaks come together with a reasonable period of maternity leave? Only the combination of a long maternity leave and a long period during which mothers can breastfeed at work can make sustained breastfeeding feasible. If the law permits a longer maternity leave followed by a very short period for breastfeeding at work, or the contrary, mothers may end up stopping this practice more easily.

Based on our data, long maternity leaves don’t always correspond to long breastfeeding entitlements. Mothers who are able to spend more time at home with their children often find it difficult to continue breastfeeding for as long as they would like once they return to work.

That’s the case in China, where women can benefit from 158 days of maternity leave, or in Vietnam, where legal maternity leave lasts 180 days. At the same time, they are given breaks to breastfeed or express their milk only until their children’s first birthday.

The alternative scenario sees legislative systems offering shorter maternity leave alongside longer breastfeeding support. This happens in Taiwan, where women are entitled to only 56 days of maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks for two years after their childbirth, or in Kuwait, where they receive 70 days of maternity leave, but the law provides them with breastfeeding breaks for two years after the child's birth.

Protections range from the 98-day maternity leave and breastfeeding breaks for three years after birth in Nepal to the 60-day maternity leave and daily breastfeeding breaks only guaranteed for six months after birth in the United Arab Emirates.

Breastfeeding at work is (also) a matter of pay

Breastfeeding is not a simple matter of biology: it’s a matter of time, and time in the workplace is money. Whether that time is paid or not makes an enormous difference. WageIndicator’s Labour Rights Index identifies three countries where nursing breaks are unpaid: Canada, New Zealand and the United States. In the United States, the right to breastfeed at work and receive pay for it remains patchy, actually: under federal law, break time for expressing milk is generally unpaid, unless employees are covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or the employer decides otherwise. At the state level, only Georgia, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York explicitly require employers to provide paid breaks for breastfeeding or expressing milk, making the landscape really scattered and uneven. The Canada Labour Code clearly states that “If you are an employee who is nursing, you are entitled to any break that is necessary for you to nurse or express milk.” However, “these breaks are unpaid.” In New Zealand, breaks are unpaid unless the employee and employer agree otherwise.

Let’s make breastfeeding and work… work

As stressed by the United Nations during World Breastfeeding Week 2023, which focused on breastfeeding and employment, the provision of breastfeeding breaks has several benefits for the workplace: it can reduce employee absenteeism and increase employee return-to-work rates, job satisfaction, and retention. Increased productivity, a competitive edge and cost savings are likely to be good side effects that lead to a healthier workplace. This should be part of a broader, family-friendly approach that goes beyond the basic requirements of nursing breaks and hygienic breastfeeding rooms. It should also include flexible working arrangements, access to childcare services, anti-discrimination and job protection provisions, as well as support groups and lactation consultants.

If ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ employers and governments should take equal responsibility. For the sake of all the Marias in the world, but also for businesses and societies.

To delve deeper into topics related to maternity rights at work, explore our country-specific Labour Law database.