Figures › Maternity, paternity, adoption and other family pay

Statutory Adoption Pay: qualifying service (weeks)

How long someone must have worked for the same employer to qualify for Statutory Adoption Pay.

26weeks

Corroborated Act of Parliament Great Britain in force since 2002-12-08

Checked against its sources: statute verified 2026-09-21·guidance verified 2026-09-21

Scope: s.171ZL also empowers regulations to treat a person as having completed the period in prescribed circumstances — broken service under successive contracts, for instance — so the count is the statutory floor rather than the whole test.

Current sources

Source A · LegislationSocial Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 171ZL ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week")

retrieved 2026-07-29

Source B · Official guidancehttps://www.gov.uk/adoption-pay-leave ("have been continuously employed by your employer for at least 26 weeks")

retrieved 2026-07-29

History

Value	From	To	Status	Sources
26	2002-12-08	—	Corroborated	Legislation: Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 171ZL ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week") retrieved 2026-07-29 Official guidance: https://www.gov.uk/adoption-pay-leave ("have been continuously employed by your employer for at least 26 weeks") retrieved 2026-07-29

Receipt

Everything above is reproducible and independently checkable — no trust in this site required (how verification works).

Figure ID: employment.sap.continuous_employment_weeks
Name in the API: Statutory Adoption Pay: continuous employment qualifier
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status): act·weeks·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256): sha256:b88c676d7b0ffdbcb443790fdabab4592d962604477dac967ae5679de151ce99
Source snapshots (SHA-256): Legislation: sha256:2a6a6aad6372b283863307527d584b4164da064b4dc0ec50858f97107299c02d; Official guidance: sha256:5400f6529dafaa67ce485437290490ada90097b68ab21b3cefc5b348ba3783e2
Listed in the signed manifest: release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.sap.continuous_employment_weeks"]
Machine-readable record: /v1/figures/employment.sap.continuous_employment_weeks · current only: /v1/figures/employment.sap.continuous_employment_weeks/current

Compiler's notes

Deliberately NOT one shared figure across the payments. The Act repeats the condition per payment and each provision carries its own regulation-making power, so a merged row would be one legal claim standing for five, and wrong for four of them the moment any one changed. No invariant couples them for the same reason. effective_from is the commencement of the Part that states the condition, read from the F-note on the archived section: "Pt. 12ZB inserted (8.12.2002) by Employment Act 2002 (c. 22), ss. 4, 55(2); S.I. 2002/2866, art. 2(2), Sch. 1 Pt. 2".