Statutory maternity pay 2026: how UK employers calculate, pay and reclaim it

Most guides to Statutory Maternity Pay are written for the person going on leave, not the person running payroll. They explain what you get. They do not explain what happens when a shift worker’s hours moved every week of the eight-week reference period, what an agency owes versus what a client owes, or why GOV.UK’s own eligibility page can quote you the wrong earnings threshold.

Those gaps land hardest in hospitality, care and recruitment agencies, where pay varies week to week and a chunk of the workforce sits with an agency rather than the end employer.

This guide is written for the payroll side of the desk. It covers Great Britain as at 17 September 2026, using the 2026/27 rates that took effect on 6 April 2026.

The quick answer

Statutory Maternity Pay is paid at 90% of average weekly earnings for the first 6 weeks, then the lower of £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings for the remaining 33 weeks, for a maximum of 39 weeks. To qualify, an employee needs 26 weeks’ continuous employment reckoned to the qualifying week (the 15th week before the expected week of childbirth) and average weekly earnings of at least £129 for 2026/27. Employers reclaim 92% of what they pay from HMRC, or 109% if their total Class 1 National Insurance liability was £45,000 or less in the qualifying tax year.

Eligibility, and a figure GOV.UK’s own page gets wrong

Two tests decide entitlement. The employee must have been continuously employed by the same employer for at least 26 weeks continuing into the qualifying week, which is the 15th week before the expected week of childbirth. And her average weekly earnings over an 8-week reference period must be at least the Lower Earnings Limit, which is £129 a week for 2026/27, up from £125 in 2025/26.

Here is the catch. As at 17 September 2026, GOV.UK’s own employer guide to eligibility still states the threshold as “at least £125 a week”, the 2025/26 figure. The correct 2026/27 figure, £129, sits on a separate GOV.UK page, the annual rates and thresholds guide. If you are relying on the eligibility page alone, you are working from a stale number. Check the current rates and thresholds page directly rather than the general eligibility guide, and do it again after every April uprating.

Employees also need to give notice. At least 15 weeks before the due date, they tell you the date and when they want leave to start. Separately, they must give at least 28 days’ notice of the date they want Statutory Maternity Pay itself to start, and you can refuse to pay if that notice is missing with no reasonable excuse. Proof of pregnancy is normally form MATB1, which cannot be issued more than 20 weeks before the due date; it should reach you within 21 days of the pay start date, though you can accept it later, and if nothing arrives by 13 weeks after that date you are not obliged to pay.

Where someone does not meet either test, you give them form SMP1 within 7 days of the decision (and no later than 28 days after their request or the birth), setting out the reason. She then uses that form to claim Maternity Allowance from the Department for Work and Pensions instead, a separate benefit we cover further down.

The rate, and the calculation that sits under it

For 2026/27, the first 6 weeks pay 90% of average weekly earnings with no upper cap. The remaining 33 weeks pay whichever is lower: £194.32 a week, or 90% of average weekly earnings. That is a rise from £187.18 in 2025/26. Total statutory pay runs to a maximum of 39 weeks, a fixed period regardless of how much of the wider 52-week leave entitlement is actually taken.

Average weekly earnings comes from an 8-week relevant period: the period running from the last normal payday on or before the end of the qualifying week, back to the last normal payday at least 8 weeks before that. For a weekly-paid employee, sum the gross pay from the 8 payslips falling in that window and divide by 8. For a monthly-paid employee, take the gross earnings from the last 2 monthly paydays before the end of the qualifying week, divide by 2, multiply by 12, and divide by 52.

Everything liable for Class 1 National Insurance counts as earnings for this purpose, paid before any deductions: basic pay, overtime, commission and bonuses, whether contractual or discretionary, and it counts if it is paid within the relevant period even where it relates to work done outside it. Miss a late-paid bonus or a batch of overtime that lands in the window and the average understates what she actually earns.

There is a backdating rule worth setting up correctly the first time. If a pay rise, including a backdated one, takes effect at any point from the start of the relevant period through to the end of statutory maternity leave, you recalculate average weekly earnings using the new rate and pay the arrears. This is the Alabaster rule, now sitting in regulation 21(7) of the Statutory Maternity Pay (General) Regulations 1986 as substituted after the original case. It applies to individual and company-wide rises alike, and it applies whether the rise was awarded before or after leave ended, provided its effective date falls inside that window. An employee who is still employed can ask for a recalculation going back up to six years; someone no longer employed has a much shorter window, around six months from their last day.

Where the AWE calculation actually breaks: irregular hours

This is the part almost no published guide for employers covers, and it is the one that matters most for a workforce paid on shifts.

There is no exclusion for a week with no pay in the relevant period. HMRC’s Statutory Payments Manual is explicit: where an employee was not due any pay on a normal payday inside the 8-week window, that week goes in as zero, it is not skipped or substituted. For an employee with no fixed pay period at all, the closest HMRC category to genuinely irregular work, the method runs off actual payment dates rather than calendar weeks: find the last payment on or before the end of the relevant week, then the last payment at least 8 weeks before that, sum everything paid between those two dates, divide by the number of days in that period, and multiply by seven.

There is no equivalent to the 52-week look-back that skips unpaid weeks under the 2020 holiday pay reforms, which we cover in our guide to zero-hours contract holiday pay. Holiday pay for irregular workers can reach back further to avoid a thin reference period. Average weekly earnings for Statutory Maternity Pay cannot. Two weeks with no shifts inside an 8-week window pull the average down exactly as two low-pay weeks would, and GOV.UK gives employers no discretion to smooth that out.

That rigidity creates a real risk worth flagging to anyone scheduling shifts, not just payroll: cutting a pregnant worker’s hours during roughly weeks 18 to 26 of pregnancy, which typically overlaps the relevant period before the qualifying week, can push her average earnings below the Lower Earnings Limit and cost her Statutory Maternity Pay entirely, forcing a fallback claim to Maternity Allowance. Where shifts appear to have been withheld specifically to avoid paying, HMRC guidance notes the worker may be able to claim Statutory Maternity Pay directly.

A worked example

A kitchen porter works variable shifts for a hospitality employer, paid weekly. Her qualifying week falls in October. In the 8 weeks before that, she worked six of the eight weeks and had two weeks with no shifts at all, earning £1,032 across the period that is actually paid.

Average weekly earnings: £1,032 ÷ 8 = £129. That clears the £129 threshold for 2026/27, but only just; had she had one more unpaid week in the window, she would have fallen below it and lost entitlement to Statutory Maternity Pay altogether, with Maternity Allowance as the only route left.

Her first 6 weeks of pay are 90% of £129, which is £116.10 a week. For the remaining 33 weeks, 90% of £129 is still £116.10, which is lower than the £194.32 flat rate, so she stays on £116.10 a week for the full 39-week period. If her average weekly earnings had instead been £220, the first 6 weeks would pay 90% of £220 (£198), and the remaining 33 weeks would drop to the £194.32 flat rate, because 90% of £220 exceeds it.

Payroll mechanics: tax, RTI and Keeping in Touch days

Statutory Maternity Pay runs through payroll like ordinary wages: it is taxable and subject to Class 1 National Insurance, deducted in the normal way each pay period, and reported to HMRC through the standard Real Time Information process on the Full Payment Submission for that pay period.

Keeping in Touch days let an employee work for you during maternity leave without losing pay or ending her leave, up to 10 days across the whole maternity pay period, whether consecutive or not. Any work at all on a day counts as one full KIT day against the allowance, regardless of hours worked.

What happens if she works an 11th day is where employer-facing guidance gets genuinely inconsistent, so it is worth being precise. Acas’s plain-English guidance says leave and pay “will automatically end” once the 10 days are exceeded. HMRC’s own Statutory Payments Manual says something narrower, with a worked example: pay is lost only for the specific week in which the 11th (or any later) day is worked, not for the rest of the maternity pay period. The statutory basis is that entitlement is switched off “in respect of any week” under section 165(4) of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, a weekly unit, not an all-or-nothing block; regulation 9A of the 1986 Regulations then exempts the first 10 days from that weekly switch-off. Run payroll on the HMRC manual’s week-by-week position, not the Acas summary, and treat any week beyond that pattern with its own check.

Reclaiming from HMRC

Most employers reclaim 92% of the Statutory Maternity Pay they have paid out. Employers whose total Class 1 National Insurance liability, employee and employer contributions combined, was £45,000 or less in the complete tax year before the employee’s qualifying week qualify for Small Employers’ Relief instead: 100% of the payment, plus a compensation element for the employer’s own National Insurance cost, for a total recovery of 109% for 2026/27. That compensation element has itself risen: 3% for years up to 2024/25, 8.5% for 2025/26, and 9% from 6 April 2026.

The mechanic is the same either way. Calculate the recoverable amount through your payroll software, then declare it on an Employer Payment Summary, which offsets against your PAYE and National Insurance liability for that tax month. If there is nothing left to offset against, you can reclaim the balance directly from HMRC from the start of the next tax year.

Agency workers and umbrella companies

Recruitment agencies carry a version of this that a generic employer guide will not answer, and it matters because agency and umbrella arrangements are common across the shift and hourly workforces this guide is written for.

Liability follows whoever operates PAYE and deducts, or would deduct if earnings were high enough, Class 1 National Insurance from the worker’s pay. In practice that is normally the agency, not the end-client business the worker is placed with. HMRC’s manual treats gaps between bookings as compatible with the 26-week continuity test where the agency genuinely had no work to offer that week, or the worker was unavailable for an explained reason such as sickness or other statutory leave; a complete week with no work and no explained reason is where an agency may treat the employment as broken. Continuity is assessed per agency, so a worker who changes agency before the qualifying week can lose the continuous-service clock she had built up with the previous one. That is a different rule from the Agency Workers Regulations 2010’s 12-week qualifying period for equal treatment with directly-recruited staff, which is a separate scheme entirely; the two get conflated more often than they should. For the wider picture of running payroll across agency and temp workforces, see our overview for recruitment agencies.

Umbrella companies sit differently again. The umbrella is the legal employer, holding the contract of employment directly, so the standard Statutory Maternity Pay rules apply to it exactly as they would to any other employer: 26 weeks with that umbrella into the qualifying week, and average weekly earnings above the threshold.

Adjacent statutory payments, briefly

Maternity Allowance is a separate, DWP-administered benefit, not an employer payment, for people who do not meet the Statutory Maternity Pay tests: the self-employed, those who changed jobs too recently, or anyone below the earnings threshold. Eligibility is broader than SMP’s, roughly 26 weeks worked in the 66 weeks before the due date with earnings of at least £30 a week for 13 of those weeks. The standard rate for 2026/27 mirrors SMP’s flat rate, £194.32 a week or 90% of average weekly earnings, paid for up to 39 weeks; a reduced £27 a week rate applies to certain self-employed claimants who have not paid enough Class 2 National Insurance. An employee cannot receive both for the same pregnancy.

Statutory Paternity Pay and Statutory Shared Parental Pay track the same £194.32 or 90% of average weekly earnings structure for 2026/27, paid by the employer and reclaimable on the same terms as SMP. From 6 April 2026, paternity leave itself became a day-one right with no minimum service required to take it, though the pay element still needs 26 weeks’ continuous employment by the qualifying week. Statutory Neonatal Care Pay, a newer entitlement for parents of babies needing neonatal care, follows the same 2026/27 rate.

Does the Employment Rights Act 2025 change any of this?

No, and it is worth stating plainly because so much else in payroll has changed this year. The commencement regulations that brought forward the Employment Rights Act 2025’s parental leave reforms, removing the qualifying period for parental leave and enabling paternity leave to follow shared parental leave, phased in through January, February and April 2026. Neither that instrument nor the wider Act commences any change to Statutory Maternity Pay itself. If a source tells you SMP eligibility or the rate structure has changed as part of the 2025 reforms, that is not what the commencement regulations say.

Pitfalls worth checking before you rely on this

A contractual or enhanced maternity scheme sits on top of the statutory minimum, it cannot replace or fall below it, and an employee keeps her entitlement to Statutory Maternity Pay even if she leaves your employment before leave starts or does not return afterwards. You cannot claw back Statutory Maternity Pay itself under any circumstances; only the enhanced, above-statutory portion of a scheme can carry a repayment clause, and only where the contract sets that out clearly.

Redundancy during maternity leave carries its own protection. Where a suitable vacancy exists, you must offer it to an employee on maternity leave ahead of other candidates, including ones who might otherwise be better qualified, on terms not substantially less favourable than her current role. That priority runs across the protected pregnancy period, the statutory leave period itself, and an additional 18 months after the birth.

Keep the Statutory Maternity Pay relevant period separate from other statutory reference periods you may be running in the same payroll. It uses its own 8-week window anchored to paydays around the qualifying week. Statutory Sick Pay, which we cover in our guide to statutory sick pay in 2026, anchors its own 8-week period to the start of the sickness absence instead, a different date for a different payment. Treating one as the other produces a wrong figure in both directions.

Where earned-wage access fits, and where it does not

Worth being precise here, because the two things sit close enough to get confused. Average weekly earnings for Statutory Maternity Pay is built from gross pay liable for Class 1 National Insurance, before any deductions. A genuine earned-wage access drawdown, taken against wages already worked and recovered through a payroll deduction at the next normal payday, does not add a separate payment or reduce the gross figure that goes into that calculation; it changes when the money reaches the worker, not how much she was paid for the shift. HMRC’s own 2024 framework for salary advances treats a payment against already-completed service as a payment of earnings, explicitly distinct from a loan, for exactly this reason. We set out the deduction and National Minimum Wage mechanics behind that distinction in our guide to salary advances for UK employers. We have not found an HMRC page that states outright “earned-wage access does not affect SMP”; the position above is our own reasoning from how average weekly earnings is defined, not a quoted rule, and we would rather say that plainly than imply a citation that does not exist.

Wagecrew EWA is employer-funded, and workers pay nothing to use it. It does not change entitlement to Statutory Maternity Pay, and we would not claim it does. If you are weighing how it sits alongside payroll processes like this one, our employer overview covers the mechanics, and our integrations page covers how it connects to the systems you already run.

Frequently asked questions

What is the statutory maternity pay rate in 2026?

For the 2026/27 tax year, from 6 April 2026, the first 6 weeks pay 90% of average weekly earnings with no cap. The remaining 33 weeks pay whichever is lower: £194.32 a week, or 90% of average weekly earnings. The maximum period is 39 weeks.

Who qualifies for statutory maternity pay?

An employee qualifies if she has been continuously employed by the same employer for at least 26 weeks continuing into the qualifying week, the 15th week before the expected week of childbirth, and her average weekly earnings over an 8-week reference period are at least £129 for 2026/27. Someone who does not meet either test may instead be able to claim Maternity Allowance from the DWP.

How do you calculate average weekly earnings for an irregular-hours worker?

Sum the gross pay actually paid in the 8-week relevant period ending with the last normal payday on or before the qualifying week, then divide by 8. Weeks with no pay inside that window count as zero; they are not excluded or substituted, and there is no equivalent to holiday pay’s rule for skipping unpaid weeks. That means shift patterns during the reference period have a direct effect on whether someone reaches the earnings threshold at all.

Can employers reclaim statutory maternity pay?

Yes. Most employers reclaim 92% of what they pay from HMRC. Employers whose total Class 1 National Insurance liability was £45,000 or less in the qualifying tax year qualify for Small Employers’ Relief instead, recovering 109%, made up of the full payment plus a 9% compensation element for 2026/27. Both are claimed through an Employer Payment Summary, offset against PAYE and National Insurance liability, or reclaimed directly from HMRC where there is nothing to offset.

What happens if an employee works more than 10 Keeping in Touch days?

HMRC’s Statutory Payments Manual treats the loss as isolated to the specific week in which the 11th, or any later, KIT day is worked; pay resumes in weeks where no further work is done, and the wider maternity pay period does not end. Acas’s plain-English guidance states more simply that leave and pay end once the limit is exceeded; payroll should follow the week-by-week position set out in HMRC’s own manual.

Who is liable for statutory maternity pay when a worker is supplied by an agency?

The organisation that operates PAYE and deducts, or would deduct, Class 1 National Insurance from the worker’s pay, which in practice is normally the agency rather than the end-client business. Continuity of employment for the 26-week test is assessed per agency, so changing agency before the qualifying week can break the continuous-service clock built up with the previous one.

Does earned-wage access affect statutory maternity pay?

No, on the reasoning available. Average weekly earnings is calculated from gross pay before deductions, and a genuine earned-wage access drawdown against wages already worked, recovered through payroll, does not change that gross figure. No HMRC guidance addresses earned-wage access by name, so this is a reasoned application of the standard average-weekly-earnings rules rather than a directly quoted position.

Does the Employment Rights Act 2025 change statutory maternity pay?

No. Its parental leave reforms, phased in through January, February and April 2026, removed the qualifying period for parental leave and changed how paternity leave interacts with shared parental leave. They did not amend Statutory Maternity Pay eligibility, the rate structure or the reclaim mechanism.

Further reading and sources

• GOV.UK, Statutory Maternity Pay and Leave: employer guide, eligibility and proof of pregnancy: the 26-week test, the qualifying week and the notice requirements.
• GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027: the current £129 Lower Earnings Limit and the £194.32 flat rate.
• GOV.UK, Maternity pay and leave: pay: the two-tier rate structure and the 39-week maximum.
• The Statutory Maternity Pay (General) Regulations 1986, SI 1986/1960: the 8-week relevant period, the backdating rule at regulation 21(7), and the Keeping in Touch day exemption at regulation 9A.
• Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, section 165: the weekly disentitlement unit that governs Keeping in Touch days.
• The Social Security Benefits Up-rating Order 2026, SI 2026/148: the instrument setting the £194.32 rate from 6 April 2026.
• Employment Rights Act 2025 (Commencement No. 1) Regulations 2026, SI 2026/3: the phased commencement of the parental and paternity leave reforms, and the absence of any Statutory Maternity Pay provision within it.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM171000: what counts as earnings for average weekly earnings, and the treatment of zero-pay weeks.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM171400: the average weekly earnings method for employees with no fixed pay period.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM172200: the Alabaster backdated pay-rise recalculation rule.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM182100: the Small Employers’ Relief threshold and the 2026/27 compensation rate.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM200100: the worked example confirming Keeping in Touch day loss is isolated to the specific pay week.
• HMRC Statutory Payments Manual, SPM250800: continuous employment for agency and short-contract workers.
• GOV.UK, Statutory Maternity Pay: how different employment types affect what you pay: agency-worker liability for PAYE and National Insurance purposes.
• GOV.UK, Get financial help with statutory pay: what you can reclaim: the 92% and 109% recovery routes and the Employer Payment Summary process.
• GOV.UK, Maternity Allowance: eligibility and rates for the DWP-administered alternative to SMP.
• GOV.UK, Paternity pay and leave: pay: the 2026/27 Statutory Paternity Pay rate.
• GOV.UK, Shared Parental Leave and Pay: how it works: the ShPP rate and the shared allowance between parents.
• Maternity Action, Zero hours contracts: maternity and parental rights: the real-world effect of shift reductions on the average weekly earnings calculation.
• Acas, During maternity leave: plain-English Keeping in Touch day guidance.