Six weeks’ paid paternity leave would add £2.68bn a year, report finds
Business Economic Syndicated News 
Six weeks of paternity leave paid at 90 per cent of earnings would add a net £2.68bn a year to the UK economy and could reduce relationship breakdown after a birth, according to a review of 33 international studies published on 9 September by King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership and Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice.
The report, Economic and Social Benefits of Enhanced Paternity Leave: Scoping Review, was written by Shiyu Yuan, Agnieszka Kasperska, Heejung Chung and Minna Cowper-Coles and funded by Equimundo and the Caring Masculinity Fund. It has been shared with ministers involved in the government’s parental leave and pay review, which the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for Work and Pensions launched on 1 July 2025 and which is due to end with a roadmap for reform.
The authors recommend six weeks at 90 per cent of normal earnings, reserved for the father or second parent and lost if unused, rather than carved out of the mother’s entitlement. They say it should extend to self-employed parents and those on fixed-term, zero-hours or temporary contracts, and be supported by employer guidance, help for smaller businesses, accessible childcare and flexible working rights.
What fathers get now
Fathers in the UK are entitled to two weeks of statutory paternity leave paid at £194.32 a week or less, which the report describes as a fraction of the minimum wage of £508 for a 40-hour week at £12.71 an hour. It cites Trades Union Congress polling from 2023 in which more than half of families reported financial difficulty when fathers took the leave.
Shared Parental Leave, which lets mothers transfer part of their maternity entitlement to a partner, is used by around 4 per cent of eligible fathers. The report treats it as a natural experiment in what happens when leave is available but transferable and poorly paid: HMRC data cited in the report shows 33 per cent of claims come from the highest income decile and effectively none from the bottom two.
Among the 52 countries in the International Network on Leave Policies and Research’s 2025 review, the report says the UK is an outlier among high-income countries in offering fathers very little well-paid individual leave.
Paternity leave became a day-one right on 6 April 2026 under the Employment Rights Act 2025. The King’s authors argue that pay, not duration, is the binding constraint on take-up.
The 33 studies cover leave reforms in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Canada, the UK and the US. Most use quasi-experimental designs applied to administrative register data, comparing families affected by a reform with similar families who were not. Working papers that have not yet been peer reviewed are flagged as such.
The authors say they can be confident of three things: fathers take reserved leave when it is well paid and earmarked, and it changes what they do at home; this supports mothers’ employment, with reforms in Canada, Spain and Germany raising mothers’ employment and full-time work by around three to five percentage points; and it narrows the gender pay gap, with Denmark’s reform cutting the earnings gap by a further 2.8 percentage points in the year after leave had finished. Evidence on wider social benefits, including wellbeing, relationship stability, fertility and children’s outcomes, is described as supportive but “not as strong”.
Quebec, Germany and Denmark
Quebec’s 2006 reform introduced five weeks of leave reserved for fathers at around 70 per cent of earnings. The report says the share of fathers claiming leave rose from 21.3 per cent to about 74.3 per cent, mothers became about five percentage points more likely to participate in the labour force and work full time, and fathers exposed to the policy were still doing an extra half hour of housework on weekdays and 1.4 to 1.6 extra hours of childcare at weekends one to three years after the leave ended.
In Germany, the 2007 reform reserved two “daddy months” within a 14-month scheme paid at 67 per cent of net earnings. Bünning found fathers who took leave cut paid work by about four hours a week and increased childcare by about one hour per weekday, and Frodermann, Wrohlich and Zucco found mothers’ earnings rose by 2.6 to 10 per cent up to nine years after childbirth, with the largest gains for mothers with high pre-birth earnings, which the report calls “a genuine equity concern”.
Denmark expanded earmarked paternity leave from two to 11 weeks in 2022. A working paper by Kleven and colleagues, based on a survey of nearly 40,000 parents linked to administrative records, found the gender earnings gap fell by 34 percentage points in the first year and by a further 2.8 percentage points in the second, after the leave had ended, with more than half of the second-year effect explained by changed beliefs about who should care and who should earn.
Not every reform produced gains. Spain’s 2007 introduction of two weeks at full pay raised mothers’ labour force participation by 4.5 per cent six months after childbirth but delayed subsequent births, the report says.
Relationship breakdown and health
Ten of the 33 studies examined family health and stability, and the report says they linked leave to better maternal health and more stable families, with variation depending on couples’ household arrangements.
In Iceland, a 2001 reform reserved one month of parental leave for fathers at 80 per cent pay. Olafsson and Steingrimsdóttir found it cut parental separation by around 11.6 percentage points five years after birth and 8.9 percentage points after 15 years. In the US, which has no national reform, Petts and colleagues found the predicted probability of separation fell from about 7.5 per cent among fathers who took no leave to 5.6 per cent among those who did.
The report also records evidence pointing the other way. Avdic and Karimi found Sweden’s 1995 and 2002 reserved months raised separation by around 0.9 to 1.4 percentage points among more traditional couples in which the father was the main breadwinner, and Norway’s extension of its quota from six to 10 weeks had no effect on union stability. The authors conclude that a UK scheme is likely to see a similar long-term shift among couples who take it, but that “there may be a small risk of the reverse among the most traditional couples”.
Family breakdown cost the Exchequer more than £50bn in 2018, according to Relationships Foundation figures cited in the report. Modelling by Clifton-Sprigg and colleagues puts the saving from reduced family breakdown under a six-week scheme at £599m a year.
On health, the report cites Norwegian evidence that the four-week father’s quota cut mothers’ sickness absence by 1.3 percentage points, mainly in families where fathers took leave beyond the quota, and finds that earmarked quotas across six European countries raised parents’ life satisfaction by about 0.18 points on a 10-point scale. Evidence on maternal mental health is described as “mixed and relatively thin”.
The £2.68bn figure comes from Joseph Rowntree Foundation modelling published on 29 April 2025, which considered six weeks of leave at 90 per cent of a father’s average weekly earnings, capped at £1,200 a week. It estimated a £5.5bn increase in economic output from more mothers entering work or increasing their hours, offset by a £2.8bn reduction as fathers take time away from work. The JRF put the gross cost to HMRC at £1.15bn, falling to a net cost to the Treasury of around £220m once additional tax revenue from mothers’ employment is counted.
A separate analysis by Clifton-Sprigg and colleagues at the University of Bath, assuming 74 per cent take-up at 90 per cent pay with no cap, estimates net social benefits of £12.8bn a year, of which labour market effects account for about £672m and wellbeing gains for about £12.2bn. It puts the direct annual cost to government at £1.3bn and annual costs to businesses at £120m, after an update to the reclaim rate for small and medium employers. The King’s authors describe the monetised wellbeing gains as “more contestable” than the labour market effects, which they treat as “the firmest ground”.
Drawing on the comparable studies, the report says six weeks of well-paid, non-transferable leave “could plausibly increase UK mothers’ employment by around 3-10 percentage points”, narrow the within-household earnings gap by roughly one to three percentage points and lift mothers’ wages by roughly two percentage points, while stressing these are benchmarks rather than precise forecasts. The six-week figure is “best understood as a policy judgement balancing evidence with feasibility, rather than a firmly established tipping point”, the authors write, and partial reform, such as extending duration while leaving pay at the flat statutory rate, “should be expected to deliver substantially weaker results”.
The report says the economic gains would concentrate among lower- and middle-income households, because higher-income fathers already have access to enhanced employer schemes. It cites figures showing only 12 to 14 per cent of fathers with a household income of £20,000 to £25,000 had access to, and took, their full entitlement of employer-enhanced parental leave, compared with 51 per cent of men with a household income above £200,000.
Research on the effects for small and medium-sized employers is described as sparse, and the authors say this is “the area where consultation and piloting with smaller employers matter most”. A Danish study included in the review, by Brenøe and colleagues using data on private firms with three to 30 employees, found anticipated parental leave imposed negligible costs, with firms hiring temporary replacements and modestly increasing co-workers’ hours, and no significant effect on output, profits or survival. The report notes that the study covers parental and maternity leave generally, under Denmark’s near-full wage reimbursement system.
On retention, it cites German evidence that mothers returned to their previous employers at higher rates after the 2007 reform, and UK survey evidence that 53 per cent of women and 63 per cent of men are not mentally ready to return to work after parental leave. Separate polling reported by Business Matters found 18 per cent of 18 to 34-year-olds had left a job because of parental leave policies.
Working Families research cited in the report found 32 per cent of fathers who felt unable to take their full entitlement worried it would harm their career progression and 26 per cent feared appearing less committed. The authors say international evidence shows such penalties are “conditional rather than inevitable” and diminish where taking leave becomes common.
Professor Heejung Chung, professor of work and employment and director of King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, said: “Paternity leave is still too often treated simply as a bill for government and employers. But the strongest evidence shows that when fathers have leave of their own and can afford to take it, they do more care at home and mothers are better able to stay in paid work, which benefits the country economically.”
Shiyu Yuan, research assistant at the institute and co-author of the study, said: “A few extra weeks that families cannot afford will not deliver the economic and social gains so many other countries have seen. Nor will asking mothers to give up part of their own leave. New dads need time that belongs to them and is paid well enough for them to use it.”
Gary Barker, founder and chief executive of Equimundo, said: “The UK, like much of the world, is experiencing a transformation in how families divide work and caring.” He added: “Expanding paternity leave is a vital step on the path towards care equality.” Half of coupled families with dependent children now have both parents in full-time work, and dual employment among couples has been rising for 20 years, according to Office for National Statistics figures cited by the researchers.
Julia Gillard, chair of King’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, said “the UK can give dads more equality and enjoy the benefits of economic and social gains by addressing together the three problems which have been identified in the current system”. The report identifies those as low leave pay, gender norms that frame caregiving as maternal, and leave that is too short, transferable or taken at the same time as the mother.
George Gabriel, co-founder of The Dad Shift, the campaign group behind a dad strike over paternity leave on 11 June 2025, said: “Two weeks paternity leave simply isn’t enough. For the sake of this generation of parents, and our children, we need to get off the bottom place of Europe’s paternity leave league table and ensure the decent majority of dads who want to show up for their partners and babies aren’t blocked by the system from doing so.”
