If your staff handbook still says an employee needs 26 weeks' service before they can take paternity leave, it's wrong, and it's been wrong since 6 April 2026.
Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave both became day-one rights on that date. There's no qualifying period any more. A new employee who starts on a Monday and whose partner gives birth on the Tuesday is entitled to give notice of paternity leave immediately. The same applies to unpaid parental leave, which used to require a year's service and now doesn't require any service at all.
A new right was introduced alongside this too: Bereaved Partner's Paternity Leave, giving a right to time off following the death of a child's mother or primary adopter. It's a narrow but important addition, and it's the kind of thing HR teams only think about once they need it, which is exactly the wrong time to be figuring out the policy from scratch.
Statutory family pay rates went up on the same date. The weekly rate for statutory maternity, paternity, shared parental, adoption and neonatal care pay increased to £194.32. If your payroll software hasn't been updated to reflect that, you're either underpaying new parents or your finance team is quietly absorbing the difference without knowing why.
The practical risk here isn't really about the law changing. It's about the gap between what your handbook says and what's actually true. A manager working from an out-of-date policy who tells a new starter they're not eligible for paternity leave because they haven't hit a service threshold that no longer exists is creating a discrimination and mismanaged-expectations problem on day one of that person's employment.
Before your next new starter asks about family leave, check the following.
Family leave policies age quickly right now. If yours hasn't been touched since before April, it needs attention. Call Neathouse Partners on 0333 041 1094 or head to neathousepartners.com to get your policies rewritten properly.
For more insight read Maternity, Paternity & Parental Leave