Last updated: May 7, 2025
Goal: outline our current parental and caretaker leave policy
🧘 As parents and caretakers ourselves, we want to be generous with headspace and financial support — to ensure you have a great start to settle in with any new family situation.
🌍 As a remote-first startup, we need to deal with a variety of jurisdictions and approaches to parental leave. For that reason, we have defined minimum standards that count for everyone.
☀️ Just because a child is not six months old anymore, doesn’t mean you won’t run into surprising new challenges (long sick leave, pandemics locking down daycares, etc). Duna is build by other parents — so we all experience these challenges and are flexible.
🎉 Our company has one very important other benefit: We are remote-first and embrace the non-linear workday (see Appendix). This allows you to freely move between work and non-work time — enabling us to be crazily ambitious whilst building your work around your (family) life, instead of the other way around.
With most of our team in Europe, some context how parental leave looks like across the EU:
| Government policies | Tech industry | |
|---|---|---|
| Duration | • Birth-giving parents typically 10 to 20 weeks | |
| • Non-birth-giving parents typically 2 to 4 weeks, usually 6 weeks at best (legal EU minimum 2 weeks) except Scandinavia | • Early stage usually follow local law, later stage startup offer typically 3-4 months | |
| Compensation | • Wide variation of options: fully paid, full with a cap, % of past salary. Some countries have years of (unpaid) leave, but only a few offer (close to) full pay for an extended period | • Early stage usually follow local law, later stage startups usually pay in full |
| Vesting | • n/a | • Different approaches: some don’t vest, some fully vest |
Duna policy or Government policy, whichever is more, you get it. This is a baseline, no matter where you are around the globe:
| Duna leave | |
|---|---|
| Duration | • Birth-giving parents: 20 weeks — start date of leave usually depends on local law |
| • Non-birth-giving parents: 8 weeks — will be doubled for the primary caretaker in specific cases (e.g., adoption, surrogate mother) | |
| • Note: this is a Duna minimum standard. If local law allows longer leaves, we will always follow local law for the rest (duration and compensation) | |
| Compensation | • Fully paid |
| Vesting | • Fully vesting |
| Children who are ill | • Please take sick leave when your kid is sick at home. This is not a vacation and it is ok to deprioritise work to be present. We only hire people who have very high intrinsic motivation — so trust everyone to take time off in this case |
As Duna grows, we plan to revisit our parental leave in the future, esp. with focus on duration of parental leave and convergence of policy between birth-giving and non-birth giving parents. We have now chosen for the current set-up, given the fragmented status quo in Europe and the stage of the business. Overall, we experience Duna as a great place for parents (ask our partners!) — and it’s a big priority for us to keep it this way.