Maternity & Paternity Pay Calculator

For the first six weeks of maternity leave, Statutory Maternity Pay is 90% of your average weekly earnings, genuinely 90%, with no cap. For a lot of people that first pay packet barely feels different to a normal month, which is exactly what makes week 7 land so hard. From week 7 onwards you get whichever is lower: the flat statutory rate (£194.32 a week) or 90% of your earnings. For most salaries above roughly £21,000 a year, the flat rate is the lower figure, so that's what you get.

Someone on £35,000 goes from around £606 a week to £194 a week in a single step. Nobody plans for that specific week, because nothing about “maternity pay” sounds like it has two completely different rates hiding inside it. If you only remember one number from this page, make it week 7.

The single biggest variable in this whole calculation isn't anything statutory. It's whether your employer enhances maternity or paternity pay beyond the legal minimum, and by how much. Some employers offer months of full pay; others offer nothing beyond SMP; most people genuinely don't know which their employer does until they ask, because it's buried in a staff handbook nobody's read since induction day.

Before you rely on any number from this calculator, ask HR or payroll for the specific shape of your scheme: how many weeks at what percentage, whether it's “full pay” or a stated percentage, and, importantly, what happens after the enhanced period ends. Some schemes taper (say, 100% for 3 months, then 50% for 3 months, then statutory); this calculator models a single enhanced tier followed by statutory, which covers most schemes but not a multi-step taper. If yours has more than one enhanced tier, run this twice, once for each phase, to get an accurate month-by-month picture.

One more thing worth asking explicitly: does the enhanced element come with a minimum return-to-work period attached? A common clause in UK enhanced maternity schemes is that if you don't come back for a set stretch afterwards (three or six months is typical), you have to repay some or all of the “extra” enhanced pay. The statutory portion is always yours to keep, but the top-up often isn't unconditional. Get it confirmed in writing rather than assuming.

From 6 April 2026, the right to take Statutory Paternity Leave became a day-one right. You don't need any minimum length of service to take the two weeks off. But almost nobody realises that the right to be paid for that leave didn't change: Statutory Paternity Pay still requires 26 weeks' continuous employment with your employer by the qualifying week (the 15th week before the due date).

So if you've started a new job in the run-up to the birth, you can genuinely be entitled to take the leave and get nothing for it, unless your new employer enhances paternity pay from day one, which is worth asking about specifically before you assume the statutory safety net applies. This gap barely gets mentioned anywhere, which is exactly why it catches people out.

Concretely: the qualifying week is the 15th week before the due date, so if you started your job less than roughly 26 weeks before that point, about 9 months before the due date, the pay test isn't met, full stop. What matters is your length of service at that one specific earlier date, not by the birth itself. Two weeks either side of that cut-off is the entire difference between roughly £390 and £0.

Statutory Maternity Leave runs for up to 52 weeks, but Statutory Maternity Pay only covers 39 of them. Weeks 40 to 52, the last 13 weeks if you take the full year, are unpaid unless your employer's enhanced scheme happens to cover them too. It's worth deciding early whether you're taking the full 52 weeks or returning sooner, because “the full year” and “the full year, paid” are two different things, and the household cashflow view above should make that gap obvious rather than something you discover in month eleven.

A few ways people bridge those last 13 weeks: saved annual leave tacked onto the end (it keeps accruing while you're on leave, and most employers let you use it before returning), a partner using Shared Parental Leave to take paid weeks the other parent hasn't used, or simply returning at week 39 instead. This calculator doesn't model Shared Parental Leave directly. It's a more complex scheme, worth its own dedicated tool, but it's worth knowing it exists before assuming weeks 40 to 52 are a fixed, unavoidable gap.

The leave ends, the pay (such as it is) stops one way or another, and the question that follows immediately is what childcare is actually going to cost once someone's back at work. That's a separate calculation with its own cliff edges: funded hours that don't start when you'd expect, a £100,000 income trap, and Tax-Free Childcare stacking on top. It's worth working through before your leave ends rather than after. See our childcare cost calculator for the month-by-month version of that question too.