Statutory paternity pay calculator 2026/27

£194.32 a week, or 90% of your average weekly earnings if that is lower, for up to 2 weeks. On £35,000 a year that is £194.32 a week and £388.64 in total, before tax and National Insurance.

You need to be employed, have told your employer in time, and have average weekly earnings of at least the lower earnings limit over about the 8 weeks before your qualifying week — £129 a week for 2026/27, and the previous year’s limit where your qualifying week falls in the year before. Your employer also checks that you have worked for them long enough and that you are still employed when the baby is born, and can pay more than the statutory amount.

Statutory Paternity Pay is paid by an employer through payroll, so self-employed work does not attract it. If you are an employee in one job and self-employed in another, the earnings test looks at what that employer paid you, and the self-employed income is not part of it.

Your employer averages what they actually paid you over a relevant period. That period usually ends with the last pay day on or before the Saturday of your qualifying week — the 15th week before the week your baby is due. It reaches back at least 8 weeks. This page has one figure to work from, your salary before leave, so it spreads that evenly over 52 weeks instead. While your pay is level, the two averages are the same. They differ when that period holds something a salary does not describe: overtime, commission, a shift or on-call premium, a bonus, a pay rise, back pay, unpaid leave, weeks paid at sick pay rates, or an irregular pay pattern. The test is each employer’s own as well, so two part-time jobs are averaged separately. A salary that adds them together can clear the lower earnings limit when neither job does. Your employer’s figure is the one that decides what you are paid.

Yes. It goes through payroll like ordinary pay, so income tax, National Insurance and any student loan come off it in the usual way, and your tax code still applies.