Figures › Maternity, paternity, adoption and other family pay

Statutory Maternity Pay: qualifying service (weeks)

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

26weeks

Corroborated Act of Parliament Great Britain in force since 1992-07-01

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

Scope: s.164 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. 164 ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the week immediately preceding the 14th week before the expected week of confinement")

retrieved 2026-07-29

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

retrieved 2026-07-29

History

Value	From	To	Status	Sources
26	1992-07-01	—	Corroborated	Legislation: Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 164 ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the week immediately preceding the 14th week before the expected week of confinement") retrieved 2026-07-29 Official guidance: https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave ("have worked for your employer continuously 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.smp.continuous_employment_weeks
Name in the API: Statutory Maternity Pay: continuous employment qualifier
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status): act·weeks·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256): sha256:a6a6d9b0aa099146c122ebe8882c8a9deb6a798daef97fb350d2a3c1f449525c
Source snapshots (SHA-256): Legislation: sha256:f27fa7ae557de08c22879ebbf6178bd761e3634c428bb6ae997c7bc31f2b7ce7; Official guidance: sha256:728dd9d923c0cc64dd79373a78cec6e2886c91437c3e1325de31dc123cbf49fd
Listed in the signed manifest: release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.smp.continuous_employment_weeks"]
Machine-readable record: /v1/figures/employment.smp.continuous_employment_weeks · current only: /v1/figures/employment.smp.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 Act's own commencement, read from s.177(4) in the archived whole-Act current view: "Except as provided in Schedule 4 to the Consequential Provisions Act, this Act shall come into force on 1st July 1992". s.164(2)(a) is the consolidated original text: the one F-note on it — "Words in s. 164(2)(a) repealed (24.11.2002) by Employment Act 2002 (c. 22), ss. 20(a), 55(2), Sch. 8(1)" — removed words at the END of the paragraph, after the 26 weeks, and the probe reports it as touching other words rather than the value.