Figures › Maternity, paternity, adoption and other family pay

Statutory Neonatal Care Pay: qualifying service (weeks)

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

26weeks

Corroborated Act of Parliament Great Britain in force since 2025-01-17

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

Scope: s.171ZZ16 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. 171ZZ16 ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week")

retrieved 2026-07-29

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

retrieved 2026-07-29

History

Value	From	To	Status	Sources
26	2025-01-17	—	Corroborated	Legislation: Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, c. 4 s. 171ZZ16 ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week") retrieved 2026-07-29 Official guidance: https://www.gov.uk/neonatal-care-pay-leave ("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.sncp.continuous_employment_weeks
Name in the API: Statutory Neonatal Care Pay: continuous employment qualifier
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status): act·weeks·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256): sha256:39b3bac707d92429c84da6e1e5b6a49a631b3c23883fa503bcbc857a569a8c60
Source snapshots (SHA-256): Legislation: sha256:6aea9249effc35cddbe1794d7080e0d3dddb98e93318bb6c30329e9765dd892e; Official guidance: sha256:c5c0cbc7ca7dd1c3807bdc550fee5750299227c757dc5cedc337f98bcb4f0032
Listed in the signed manifest: release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.sncp.continuous_employment_weeks"]
Machine-readable record: /v1/figures/employment.sncp.continuous_employment_weeks · current only: /v1/figures/employment.sncp.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. 12ZE inserted (17.1.2025) by Neonatal Care (Leave and Pay) Act 2023 (c. 20), s. 3(3), Sch. para. 5; S.I. 2025/41, reg. 2".