Paternity leave in the UK is a disgrace, but some companies are leading from the front.
We’ve gathered hundreds of companies’ paternity leave policies to rate the best in the UK.
Now you can compare your paternity leave policy against the best across the country.
Poor paternity leave is bad for parents, bad for children and bad for society.
In the UK, Statutory Paternity Pay for eligible employees is either £184.03 a week or 90% of a new fathers/non-birthing partners average weekly earnings. This is the government baseline, which sets the standard for what workplaces are willing to offer.
When dads and non-birthing partners aren’t given enough paid time off, women suffer without support from their partner, the family suffers from a lack of bonding time and the choice on which parent returns to work is taken away.
We conducted research on paternity leave in the UK and here are some stats that might (or might not!) shock you.
Our Paternity League Table shows that finance firms are surprisingly ahead of the curve, offering some of the most generous paternity leave packages.
While hundreds of businesses, including major firms, are only offering statutory leave.
It’s this growing ‘paternity leave gap’ that’s widening the divide between forward-thinking employers and those clinging to the bare minimum.
Our findings show that finance and investment firms offer some of the most generous paternity leave policies, offering an average of 11.6 weeks of paternity leave.
And despite their reputation for innovation, big tech firms are behind the curve offering as little as 6 weeks – a contrast to leaders in other industries.
We’d love to hear how paternity leave was for you. Whether good or bad, as a non-birthing partner or the one giving birth. If you’ve struggled or flourished because of good or bad policies impacting you, we want to hear that too.
Share your stories on social media using #PaternityLeague.
This is a campaign for change – we exist to help families flourish, and believe that family starts at day one. We want to make this happen, here’s how:
Paid time off for fathers/non-birthing partners to be increased to a minimum of 90% salary for 6 weeks leave (to be taken in the child’s first year).
For paternity leave and pay to kick in from the point of labour (so partners can support during birth).
For workplaces to openly state their paternity policies when advertising roles (actively promote them to male staff, and monitor take-up).
The Koru Kids mission
We’re on a mission to find every family the childcare they need to help their family flourish. Childcare that creates awesome mini-humans, puts emotional wellbeing first, is easy to arrange, and doesn’t cost the earth.
Quality childcare not only improves children’s lives, but gives you the opportunity to pursue your career aspirations—so the whole family is happy and thriving.
We know there’s an undeniable link between fathers/non-birthing partners taking adequate paternity leave, women/birthing partners doing better at work and feeling better, children feeling happier and the economy thriving. But the current state of paternity leave in the UK doesn’t foster gender equality, and doesn’t set parents up for success during those crucial early months with a newborn. We want to change that so that families can flourish – regardless of whether they need help with childcare or not.
To give as much financial support and time to families as possible whilst balancing our own needs as an early-stage Series A company, Koru Kids are able to offer 6 weeks paid at 100% salary for fathers and non-birthing partners taking paternity leave. This is the same as our mat leave offering – 6 weeks 100% pay on top of what the government offers.
Those companies sitting at the top of the table, such as Diageo, are offering extremely generous paternity leave packages with leave/pay much higher than what we’re proposing as a base level requirement. It follows that our campaign ask is then sitting in the bronze tier, rather than gold/silver. In our view, if companies can offer a package as generous as those in the gold/silver tier, our ask of 6 weeks at 90% salary should be an achievable one for most and for the government.
Just hover over the code below and click ‘Copy’ in the top right corner. Drop this code into your own site to embed.
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Paternity leave in the UK is a disgrace. Find out who's leading the charge with progressive policies on the
<a href="https://www.korukids.co.uk/about/campaigning-fund-childcare/paternity-league-2025" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer ugc">Paternity League Table</a>.
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*Statutory paternity leave is either 1 week or 2 consecutive weeks’ leave at a rate of either £184.03 a week or 90% of their average weekly earnings (whichever is lower). Tax and National Insurance need to be deducted. Find out more on the Government website: https://www.gov.uk/paternity-pay-leave/leave
Tool methodology
The data covers October 2022 to January 2025 and is entirely user-generated. We’ve verified using publicly available data as best we can but we can’t guarantee the policies listed are true to the current policies of each company.
The 436 companies were all the companies that were collected from the database after we cleaned and reviewed each entry.
Once the data was collected we put in place a ranking system which aimed to rank both paternity leave and paternity pay from highest to bottom. These two metrics were ranked independently and a third rank was put in place to decide which company was the best based on both paternity leave and paternity pay. In order to come up with a hypothetical paternity leave pay, we took the average salary of £37,430 as per ONS data in 2025 which then enabled us to split the companies in the study into 3 distinct categories – Gold, Silver & Bronze. The calculation of the splits was based on the difference between the upper and lower salary value in our study which then was split into 3 thirds providing us with each split.
