Shared Parental Leave Planner 2026/27

Your leave plan

Expected birth or placement date

Weeks of maternity or adoption leave used before switching

Weeks of maternity or adoption pay used before switching

Parent A planned SPL weeks

Parent B planned SPL weeks

Parent A paid weeks wanted

Parent B paid weeks wanted

Optional note This planner assumes a simple split of the remaining statutory weeks. Employer enhancements and multi-block booking rules are not modelled.

Estimated Shared Parental Pay in your plan

£0 Planned shared leave: 0 weeks

Leave weeks still available to share0

ShPP weeks still available to share0

Planned total leave0

Planned paid weeks0

Earliest shared-leave start-

Suggested 8-week notice date-

Plan statusWithin the statutory caps

What this means

The most useful way to use SPL is to separate the leave question from the pay question. Leave can continue beyond the paid weeks, so your cashflow plan and your childcare plan need to be looked at together.

Childcare support next

What this page is checking

Shared Parental Leave works by ending maternity or adoption leave early and using some of the remaining weeks as SPL instead. Shared Parental Pay works the same way: it depends on how many statutory pay weeks are left after the original leave route is curtailed.

The first two weeks after birth are compulsory maternity leave for most birth mothers, so the maximum shared leave is usually 50 weeks.

Shared Parental Pay is usually capped at the remaining part of the 39-week statutory pay window.

Bookings can be made in blocks, and employers can respond differently to discontinuous leave requests, so this planner deliberately keeps the first pass simple.

Your leave plan

What this means

What this page is checking

Sources and assumptions