UK Paternity Leave Request Form | 2 Weeks, Split or Single

A paternity leave request form is not a contract and not an application the employer can freely decline. It is a notice. Statutory paternity leave is a right under the Paternity and Adoption Leave Regulations 2002, and an eligible employee who gives proper notice is entitled to take it. The form exists to capture that notice in writing, with the dates, the chosen pattern of leave, and the declarations the employer needs before processing Statutory Paternity Pay (SPP).

People often confuse this document with a holiday request or a shared parental leave notice, and the distinction matters. Annual leave is discretionary and the employer can refuse it with counter-notice. Paternity leave is a qualifying right that cannot be refused if the conditions are met, though the employer can ask for the notice in a particular format. Shared parental leave is a separate, more complex scheme that lets parents divide a larger pool of leave between them. This form deals only with the core two-week statutory paternity entitlement, which keeps it short and predictable.

For the employee, the value is protection. A signed, dated request is the difference between leave that is agreed and leave that someone later claims was never approved. For the employer, it is the evidence trail that supports the payroll run and any HMRC query about SPP. You can pair it with a broader process for capturing time off using our UK leave request templates for annual, parental and sick leave, which keep every category consistent across the business.

Statutory paternity leave and pay sit on two main pillars: the Employment Rights Act 1996, which creates the family-leave architecture, and the Paternity and Adoption Leave Regulations 2002, which set the detail. Pay is governed separately by the Statutory Paternity Pay and Statutory Adoption Pay (General) Regulations 2002 made under the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992. The rules were reshaped by the Paternity Leave (Amendment) Regulations 2024, in force from 8 March 2024, which applied to children whose expected week of childbirth began on or after 6 April 2024.

Those 2024 reforms changed three things that this form has to reflect. Leave can now be taken as two separate one-week blocks rather than a single period, it can be taken at any time within 52 weeks of birth or placement rather than the old eight-week window, and the notice for each period of leave dropped to 28 days. One older requirement survives: the employee must still notify the employer of their intention to take paternity leave by the 15th week before the expected week of childbirth (the qualifying week). Both notice points matter, and a form that captures only the dates without the early entitlement notice leaves a gap.

The most recent shift comes from the Employment Rights Act 2025. From 6 April 2026, statutory paternity leave became a day-one right, removing the previous 26 weeks' service requirement to take the leave itself. The 26-week service test still applies to claim Statutory Paternity Pay, alongside an average weekly earnings threshold at or above the lower earnings limit. SPP is paid at the lower of 90% of average weekly earnings or the prescribed statutory rate. The competent authority for the wider scheme is HMRC for pay and the employment tribunal for disputes. For the full eligibility tests and notice rules, the GOV.UK overview of paternity pay and leave entitlements is the authoritative reference.

The obvious trigger is an expected birth, where a father or partner wants to book their two weeks and needs the employer to plan cover. In practice the most reliable moment to use the form is early, around the qualifying week, because that is when the 15-week entitlement notice falls due and missing it can complicate the later pay claim. A second common scenario is adoption, where the partner of the main adopter takes paternity leave and the notice runs from the matching date rather than a due date. The mechanics are the same, only the trigger event changes.

The form also earns its place when leave is split. Since the 2024 reforms an employee might take one week at the birth and a second week three months later, and each block needs its own 28-day notice. Without a written request per block, employers lose track of which week has been taken and which is still owed. A third situation is the late or variable due date, where the baby arrives early or weeks shift. A clear form lets the employee re-notify dates without anyone arguing about what was originally agreed.

Two edge cases legitimately call for extra care. Where a baby is admitted to neonatal care, separate neonatal care leave and pay rights may apply on top of paternity leave, and the standard form should not be treated as covering them. And where the employee has less than 26 weeks' service, they can now take the leave from day one but may not yet qualify for SPP, so the request should record that the leave is taken unpaid or partly paid. Employers handling several family-leave types in parallel often standardise the paperwork using a section 1 statement of written particulars template so leave entitlements are documented from the start of employment.

• The eligibility declaration asks the employee to confirm their relationship to the child and their responsibility for its upbringing, which is the statutory basis for the right. It also flags the 15-week qualifying week notice and the separate 26-week service test for pay, so neither side assumes SPP is automatic when it is not.
• The chosen leave dates and pattern record whether the employee is taking one week or two, and whether the two weeks are consecutive or split into separate blocks. Each block carries its own start date and its own 28-day notice reference, which protects the employee if the second week is challenged months later.
• The expected week of childbirth or placement date anchors the request to the statutory window, confirming the leave falls within the 52 weeks now permitted. For adoption it captures the matching date instead, because the clock runs differently.
• The pay and SPP section states the employee's average weekly earnings position and notes that pay is the lower of 90% of earnings or the statutory weekly rate. It avoids promising a figure the payroll system has not yet verified, which is where disputes start.
• The employer confirmation block is the part that turns a request into an agreement. It gives a dated space to approve the dates, confirm cover arrangements, and note any SPP eligibility check, so the document doubles as the payroll instruction.

England, Wales and Scotland operate the same statutory paternity scheme, so the dates, the two-week entitlement, and the 2024 flexibility rules read identically across Great Britain. The practical differences tend to be administrative rather than legal. Northern Ireland runs a parallel but separately legislated regime, and several 2026 changes, including bereavement and miscarriage provisions, were introduced on its own timetable, so an employer with staff in Belfast should not assume the GB factsheet covers every Northern Irish detail.

The bigger variation is contractual rather than territorial. Many employers offer enhanced paternity pay above the statutory rate, and where they do, the request form should record whether the employee is claiming statutory pay, enhanced pay, or a mix, because the eligibility tests can differ. Public sector and larger private employers frequently top up the first one or two weeks to full salary, while smaller businesses stay at the statutory minimum. A second point worth checking is local handover practice in specialised roles, where a one-week notice culture has grown up informally despite the statutory 28-day standard. Aligning the form with the statutory notice protects the employer if a request is later disputed. Businesses formalising these internal standards often anchor them in their core staff documents, such as a full-time UK contract of employment template that sets out family-leave entitlements clearly from the outset.

You start by entering the employee's details and their relationship to the child, because that relationship is what grounds the statutory right. From there the form asks for the expected week of childbirth or the adoption matching date, which fixes the request inside the 52-week window. You then choose the leave pattern: one week, two consecutive weeks, or two separate one-week blocks, and the form opens a dated field for each block so the 28-day notice is captured per period rather than once for the whole leave.

Next you record the pay position. The form prompts for the SPP eligibility points, the 26-week service check and the earnings threshold, without committing to a payment figure that payroll has not confirmed. Once the employee signs and dates the declaration, the document passes to the manager, who uses the employer confirmation block to approve the dates, note cover, and log the SPP check. The completed form then sits with payroll and HR as a single source of truth. If you manage other absence categories the same way, our annual and parental leave request templates keep the process uniform across the team.

The most frequent error is treating the form as a holiday request the employer can refuse or amend at will. Statutory paternity leave is a qualifying right, and an employer who blocks an eligible, properly notified request risks an employment tribunal claim. The mirror-image mistake is the employee assuming pay follows automatically. Leave became a day-one right from 6 April 2026, but SPP still needs 26 weeks' service and the earnings threshold, so a new joiner can be entitled to the time off and not the pay. Recording the pay position on the form at the outset prevents a nasty surprise on payday.

Notice timing causes the rest of the trouble. People forget the two-stage structure: the 15-week entitlement notice before the qualifying week, then 28 days before each block of leave. A split-leave request that captures only the first week and never re-notifies the second is the classic gap, and it surfaces months later when the second week is queried. Another quiet error is ignoring the neonatal care position, where extra leave and pay may run alongside paternity leave and the standard form simply does not reach it. Finally, employers sometimes file the request without completing the confirmation block, leaving the dates agreed verbally and unrecorded. That is precisely the "agreed in the corridor" dispute the document is meant to kill. For ending arrangements rather than starting them, a properly structured letter such as our UK redundancy notice letter template shows the same discipline of writing decisions down.