Why Shared Parental Leave Uptake Remains Below 5%

The structural reasons

Four overlapping reasons keep Shared Parental Leave uptake low. None are about culture or willingness — they are mechanical features of the scheme.

1. Eligibility friction

To qualify for SPL, both parents must independently satisfy the work-and-earnings continuity tests: the birth parent needs 26 continuous weeks of employment, and the partner needs to have worked 26 of the last 66 weeks with average earnings of £30/week+ in any 13 of those weeks. The birth parent must then formally "curtail" their SMP or Maternity Allowance — an irreversible step that signals to the employer how much leave is being transferred. The compliance burden is non-trivial: HMRC and the partner's employer must both be notified within precise time windows.

2. Flat-rate pay disincentive

Shared Parental Pay (ShPP) is flat-rate from week 1 at £187.18 (2026-27). There is no 90% AWE step. For a higher-earning birth parent, switching from SMP (which had 6 weeks at 90% AWE) to ShPP loses the high-pay weeks unless those have already been taken. For a lower-earning partner taking ShPP, the flat rate may be a step down from their normal income but is the same flat rate the birth parent was already on for weeks 7-39. Net effect: families rarely come out financially ahead.

3. Employer policy gaps

Many UK employers offer enhanced maternity pay (often 13-26 weeks at full pay), but far fewer offer enhanced ShPP. The CIPD's regular HR surveys show that around 50-65% of large employers enhance SMP, while only 15-25% enhance ShPP at the same level. The asymmetry penalises the partner who takes SPL: their employer is more likely to default to flat statutory rate. Birth parents whose employers enhance SMP but not ShPP have a clear financial incentive to take the full maternity entitlement themselves.

4. Behavioural default-effects

SMP is the default — it kicks in automatically once the qualifying paperwork is filed at 15 weeks before EWC. SPL is opt-in, requiring active curtailment, partner-employer notification, and at least 8 weeks' notice per leave block. Defaults are powerful: in workplace pension auto-enrolment, default opt-in lifted participation from 55% to 85%+. Maternity policy operates the same way in reverse — leaving the default as SMP-only generates SMP-only outcomes for the vast majority of eligible families.

What would change uptake

Three changes consistently appear in policy evaluations and academic literature. Day-one rights: removing the 26-week continuity requirement so partners qualify from day one of employment. Non-transferable partner leave: a use-it-or-lose-it block ringfenced for the non-birth parent (the Nordic model). Higher pay floor: raising ShPP closer to the 90% AWE rate or capping replacement at a percentage of pre-leave earnings. The 2024 government consultation on Paternity Leave reform addressed (3) modestly by allowing the 2 paternity weeks to be split — but did not raise the flat rate or introduce a non-transferable block.

Implications for individual families

If you are considering Shared Parental Leave, run the calculator with realistic salaries and your specific employer enhanced-policy terms. The decision usually turns on whether the partner's employer enhances ShPP, whether the birth parent has finished the high-pay phases of SMP before transferring, and whether unpaid leave (weeks 40-52) is financially viable for your household budget. For most couples the answer is "SMP-only is simpler and not financially worse" — which is exactly why uptake stays low.

Comparison with the Nordic model

The Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland) all run shared-leave systems with materially higher uptake by partners. Three structural features distinguish their model from UK SPL. First, non-transferable partner blocks: a portion of the total leave is ring-fenced for the partner and lost if not taken. This converts an opt-in to an opt-out. Second, higher pay floors: parental leave is paid at around eighty percent of pre-leave salary up to a generous cap, not at a fixed weekly flat rate. Third, cultural normalisation: after a generation of operation, taking the partner block is a default workplace expectation rather than an unusual choice. UK SPL replicates none of these features.

The 2018 government evaluation of SPL concluded that uptake was constrained primarily by the eligibility friction and pay-rate gap rather than by cultural resistance. Subsequent CIPD and Equalities and Human Rights Commission surveys have reached similar conclusions. The 2024 paternity reform addressed neither the eligibility test nor the flat-rate pay, which is why projections expect SPL uptake to remain in the low single digits through the late 2020s.

Employer perspectives

Large employers cite three reasons for not enhancing ShPP at the same level as enhanced maternity. First, the employer who pays ShPP is the partner's employer, not the birth parent's — so the enhancement falls outside the established "we look after our employees during their family-formation years" frame that justifies enhanced maternity pay. Second, ShPP is administratively complex: each leave block requires separate notification, eligibility verification, and payroll handling, which discourages routine processing. Third, the take-up rate is low — investing in an enhanced-ShPP policy that very few employees use returns little visible HR-brand benefit.

A small but growing number of employers, particularly in tech and consulting, offer parity-enhanced leave (the partner gets the same enhanced terms as the birth parent). These employers report measurable improvements in retention and recruitment metrics among employees in their late twenties to mid thirties. The financial case is not zero, but it is meaningfully harder to make for the long tail of employers in less competitive labour markets.

The behavioural economics of opt-in benefits

Default-effect literature applied to maternity-leave decisions consistently finds that opt-in regimes underperform opt-out regimes by very large margins. The classic example is workplace pension auto-enrolment, which lifted UK participation from around fifty-five percent to over eighty-five percent within a few years of introduction in 2012. The structural mechanism is the same: people are systematically less likely to take actions that require active decision-making and form completion, even when those actions are clearly in their interest.

Applied to Shared Parental Leave: SMP is the default and kicks in automatically once the MAT B1 paperwork is filed at 15 weeks before EWC. SPL requires active curtailment, employer notifications from both parents, 8 weeks notice before each block, and HMRC paperwork for ShPP claims. Each additional step is an opportunity to drop out, postpone, or default back to SMP-only. A policy reform that flipped the default — automatic eligibility unless actively waived — could plausibly lift SPL uptake by an order of magnitude without changing pay rates or eligibility tests.

For full editorial methodology see our methodology page.

Reviewed byPlainMaternity Editorial, Editorial Team