Maternity Pay Calculator for 2025/26

Use this Statutory Maternity Pay calculator (updated 21/04/2025) to calculate Statutory Maternity Pay accurately for tax year 2025/2026.

Download Statutory Maternity Pay calculator for Excel

To view how these values are calculated and compare tax years, you can download the Excel calculator by entering your details to receive it via email. Spot an error or have feedback? Let us know.

Types of maternity pay

There are three types of maternity pay:

• Statutory maternity pay is what most employees get as their legal minimum.
• Contractual maternity pay is defined in the employer’s maternity leave policy and is often higher than the statutory pay.
• Maternity allowance is paid by the government to self-employed and employees who are not eligible for maternity pay.

What You Need to Know About Maternity Pay

After understanding the types of maternity pay (Statutory, Contractual, and Maternity Allowance), it is important to know how the calculations work and what terms are used in this process.
Just like other HR functions, these terms are used in the form of acronyms such as:

• EWC – Expected Week of Childbirth
• SMP – Statutory Maternity Pay
• AWE – Average Weekly Earnings

These terms are maybe a little bit confusing, but if you understand their meanings, it will be easy to make the calculations. Let’s understand step by step:

Employment Type

First, you have to understand in which category the employee falls — for example, employee or self-employed.

• Employee: An employee is someone who works under a contract and receives all employee benefits.
• Self-employed: A self-employed person doesn’t receive a salary through PAYE. Normally, they don’t get SMP.

Expected Week of Childbirth (EWC)

EWC stands for “Expected Week of Childbirth.” It normally starts from the Sunday before the expected date of birth.

Average Weekly Earnings (AWE)

AWE stands for “Average Weekly Earnings,” also known as “Average Weekly Pay.” It is the most important figure when calculating SMP. An employee is eligible for SMP if their average earnings are at least £120 per week.
It has a simple formula: calculate the total earnings in the relevant duration and divide them by the number of weeks.

Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP)

If you did not know about this one, SMP stands for “Statutory Maternity Pay.” It is the amount you have to pay to your employee during pregnancy and maternity leave period.

What Makes NHS Maternity Pay Different?

If an employee works in the NHS (National Health Service), their maternity pay is not only limited to Statutory Maternity Pay. The NHS has its own policy framework called “Agenda for Change”, which offers more comprehensive benefits. NHS employees receive a few weeks of full pay, a few weeks of half pay, and a few weeks of SMP.These benefits help employees financially throughout their pregnancy and postnatal recovery. Our current calculator is designed for SMP, but NHS employees can still use it for basic estimates.

Maternity pay qualifying period

An employee is entitled to statutory maternity pay if:

• She worked for the employer during the 15th week (the qualifying week) before the baby is due and worked for a minimum of 26 weeks before that. Effectively, if she has been employed for 41 weeks before the due date.
• Her average weekly pay over the 8 weeks before the qualifying week was higher than £123.

How to use the statutory maternity pay calculator

Choose the employment start date

The date when the employee commenced her employment. This is to check whether the employee has worked enough (i.e. continuously for at least 26 weeks before the qualifying week).

Set the expected due date

This is to get the expected week of childbirth (EWC) which is used to get the qualifying week (i.e. the 15th week before EWC).

Chose the maternity leave date

This is used to help you in order to calculate the last day of full pay and the first day of maternity pay. This is because the first payday after the employee goes on maternity leave may combine her standard salary and maternity pay.

Determine date of last payslip

In order for us to produce a payment calendar, we need to know a day you regularly paid your employee. If the last payslip happened on an irregular payday, insert a regular payday so that we will be able to create a more accurate payment schedule breakdown.

Determine average weekly earnings

You need to calculate the average weekly earnings over the 8 weeks prior to the final payday before the end of the qualifying week. For the first 6 weeks, you need to pay 90% of the employee’s average weekly earnings, while for the remaining 33 weeks you will need to pay the minimum between £172.48 per week and 90% of the employee’s weekly earnings.

Calculate maternity allowance

If you are self-employed or you cannot receive statutory maternity pay, you can still receive maternity allowance from the government which goes from £27 to £172.48 a week for 39 weeks. This will depend on how long you have been registered with HMRC and how much Class 2 National Insurance contributions you have paid. If you want to increase the amount of allowance you receive, you can opt to pay more Class 2 National Insurance contribution. You can read more about maternity allowance at the following link .