Statutory Paternity Pay - Non-Consecutive Weeks

Background

The government has announced new arrangements for parents who take Statutory Paternity Leave whereby payees can choose to take either 1 week or 2 weeks’ leave. If they choose to take 2 weeks of leave, they can decide whether to take them together or separately.

Your employee must give you 28 days’ notice before the start of any block of leave and if they want to change their start date. They can also change whether they plan to take 1 week or 2 weeks.

The rules are different if employee is adopting.

The amount of time is the same even if they have more than one child (for example twins).

Leave cannot start before the birth or placement date. The start date must be one of the following:

the actual date of birth or placement.
a specified number of days after the birth.
a set date, which is after the date of birth.

Leave must finish within 52 weeks of the birth (or due date if the baby is born before the expected week of birth) or placement. The start and end dates are different if the employee is adopting.

Update

The ability to be able to pay Statutory Paternity Pay (SPP) in non-consecutive weeks will be available later in the tax year 2024-2025. Should you need to split the SPP weeks before the feature is available, there are 2 options:

Option 1

Step	Instruction

Step	Instruction
1	Enter the Expected Week of Childbirth for the SPP episode as normal.
2	Enter the baby born date of when you want to pay the SPP from rather than the actual born date.
3	Enter the Date you received the notice and the start date of the SPP payment.
4	In SPP weeks select 1.
5	Click the Calculate button. The system will determine entitlement.
6	Repeat steps 1 to 5 for the second week. The difference would be to enter a baby born date as a date the week the payment is due (the previous rules dictated that the payment can only be within 56 days of when the baby is born). Apply the PPP Start Date as the week you want to pay.

Option 2

Step	Instruction

Step	Instruction
1	Enter the Expected Week of Childbirth for the SPP episode as normal.
2	Enter the baby born date of when you want to pay the SPP from rather than the actual born date.
3	Enter the Date you received the notice and the start date of the SPP payment.
4	In SPP weeks select 1.
5	Click the Calculate button. The system will determine entitlement.
6	In the period that you wish to pay the second week, in the pay batch, select the SPP pay code and enter the SPP rate. The system will still determine the SPP recovery even if the value is entered directly in the pay batch as long as the SPP pay code is used.