Figures › Maternity, paternity, adoption and other family pay

Statutory Paternity Pay: qualifying service (weeks)

How long someone must have worked for the same employer to qualify for Statutory Paternity 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.171ZA 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. 171ZA ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week")

retrieved 2026-07-29

Source B · Official guidancehttps://www.gov.uk/paternity-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. 171ZA ("a continuous period of at least 26 weeks ending with the relevant week") retrieved 2026-07-29 Official guidance: https://www.gov.uk/paternity-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.spp.continuous_employment_weeks
Name in the API: Statutory Paternity Pay: continuous employment qualifier
Record fields (source type · unit · jurisdiction · status): act·weeks·GB·corroborated
Record hash (canonical JSON, SHA-256): sha256:54833b9452affbf4e2945a10d4edf46a80bded50c36e6c2bc64088e951612092
Source snapshots (SHA-256): Legislation: sha256:3d8eb4eb7fac3ab3ba16fce0cd925934dd31ff382092ce35812a969a29c5539c; Official guidance: sha256:a22b093e1c2accb654198892dea38848dd7eb3cf02d82b0199baaa4898a8b015
Listed in the signed manifest: release 3.0.0 manifest · record_hashes["employment.spp.continuous_employment_weeks"]
Machine-readable record: /v1/figures/employment.spp.continuous_employment_weeks · current only: /v1/figures/employment.spp.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. 12ZA inserted (8.12.2002) by Employment Act 2002 (c. 22), ss. 2, 55(2); S.I. 2002/2866, art. 2(2), Sch. 1 Pt. 2".