Maternity Allowance pays up to £194.32 a week for 39 weeks if you are self-employed or cannot get Statutory Maternity Pay from an employer. What you actually receive depends on your National Insurance record and how you have been earning across the 66 weeks before your due date.
Key Takeaways
- Maternity Allowance is worth £194.32 a week or 90% of your average weekly earnings, whichever is lower, for up to 39 weeks.
- You need 26 weeks of work in the 66 weeks before your due date, and earnings of at least £30 a week across any 13 of them.
- Profits above the £7,105 Small Profits Threshold count as Class 2 National Insurance paid, which unlocks the full rate.
- A short Class 2 record can drop your award to £27 a week, and you can pay the missing contributions to have the claim recalculated.
- Directors paying themselves at least £129 a week through payroll usually qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay instead, and the company can reclaim 109% of it.
- Maternity Allowance is tax free and never appears on your Self Assessment return, though it reduces Universal Credit pound for pound.
- You can apply from 26 weeks pregnant on form MA1, with payments starting as early as 11 weeks before the baby is due.
Table of contents
1. How much is maternity allowance?
The most you can get is £194.32 a week, or 90% of your average weekly earnings if that comes to less, paid for up to 39 weeks. There are three bands, and which one you land in depends on how you have been working:
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- Somewhere between £27 and £194.32 a week for up to 39 weeks if you are self-employed with a partial Class 2 record
- £27 a week for up to 14 weeks if you do unpaid work in your spouse’s or civil partner’s business
For most freelancers with an established trading history, the top rate is the realistic expectation rather than the best case. Payments arrive every 2-4 weeks in arrears, and the full 39 weeks comes to £7,578.48 before any reduction to other benefits.
2. Who qualifies for maternity allowance?
You qualify by passing two tests over the 66 weeks up to and including the week before your baby is due. That stretch is called the test period.
The employment test asks for at least 26 weeks of employment or self-employment inside those 66 weeks. Those weeks do not have to run consecutively, and they do not have to be the same kind of work. A year spent on a PAYE contract, followed by six months freelancing, followed by a gap, counts perfectly well as long as the weeks add up.
The earnings test asks for average earnings of at least £30 a week gross across any 13 weeks in the test period, and you get to pick the 13 weeks that suit you best. They need not be consecutive either, which matters if your income arrives in irregular project payments rather than a monthly salary.
That combination is more forgiving than most people assume. If you have been working as a sole trader alongside occasional employed work, you are more likely to qualify than not.
3. Statutory maternity pay if you run a limited company
If you pay yourself through your own company’s payroll and your average weekly earnings are at least £129, you should be claiming Statutory Maternity Pay from the company rather than Maternity Allowance from the DWP.
SMP pays 90% of your average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, then £194.32 or 90% of earnings for the remaining 33, so on most director salaries it beats Maternity Allowance outright.
The objection is cash flow, since the company pays it first. In practice it gets most or all of it back.
Employers reclaim 92% of SMP as standard, and 109% if they qualify for Small Employers’ Relief, which applies where the Class 1 National Insurance bill was £45,000 or less in the last complete tax year before the qualifying week. Almost every creative studio and one-person company sits comfortably under that, so the company recovers more than it pays out.
Where the salary sits below £129 a week, which is common if you have been taking most of your income as dividends, the company issues you form SMP1 and you claim Maternity Allowance as an employed person instead. That makes how you pay yourself from your company worth revisiting well before you plan to conceive.
4. How to claim maternity allowance?
You claim on form MA1, and you can send it as soon as you are 26 weeks pregnant. Payments can start from the 11th week before your due date, or from the day after the birth, whichever you choose.
Three things need to be in the envelope. The MA1 form itself, which you can download or request by phone on 0800 055 6688. Your MATB1 maternity certificate, which your midwife or GP issues from around 20 weeks and which nobody will process the claim without. And evidence of your earnings, meaning payslips if you were employed, or your own invoices and records if you were not.
Anyone already keeping proper business records can pull the evidence out in an afternoon.
5. Tax, Universal Credit and working while you claim
Maternity Allowance is tax free.
It does not go on your Self Assessment return and no National Insurance comes off it. Statutory Maternity Pay is treated the opposite way, with tax and NI deducted like any other wage, which is worth factoring in when you compare the two.
Other benefits are a different matter.
Maternity Allowance reduces Universal Credit pound for pound, stops Jobseeker’s Allowance entirely, and affects Housing Benefit, Employment and Support Allowance and Council Tax Reduction. The benefit cap can apply too.
Working while you claim is limited to 10 keeping in touch days across the whole 39 weeks. Work any part of a day and the whole day is used up, and once the 10 are gone you lose a week’s payment for every week you work.
For a freelancer that bites, since answering a client brief on a Tuesday morning costs the same as a full day on site. Weigh any fee against a lost week of allowance and the extra it adds to your taxable profit for the year.
6. Where WallsMan Creative fit in with maternity allowance help
WallsMan Creative are specialist accountants for the creative industries, working with freelancers, studios and owner-managed companies from offices at Somerset House and Kingston upon Thames. Director payroll, self-employment records and the choices that sit between the two are the day job here, which is exactly the ground maternity pay decisions are fought on.
The money you end up with depends less on the rules than on how you are set up when the test period starts. A sole trader with a full Class 2 record and a director on a £129 salary land in very different places, and both can be arranged deliberately if you look early enough.
If you are planning a family and want to know which side of that line you are on, or you have had a £27 offer land and think it should have been more, it is worth a conversation before you send anything to the DWP.
