As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly check your Statutory Maternity Pay eligibility.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 30 minutes until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the current Statutory Maternity Pay guidance on GOV.UK and keep it available while you work through the check.
   2. Gather your contract or employment records, expected week of childbirth, planned maternity leave date and payslips covering the relevant pay period.
   3. Remove your National Insurance number, bank details and other unnecessary identifiers, then paste the remaining dates, employment details and pay figures into the prompt.
   4. Ask the chatbot to produce a provisional result, list every condition it applied and identify any missing evidence rather than filling gaps.
   5. Compare each cited condition and date with the current GOV.UK guidance, checking that the chatbot has used your actual payslip figures and not estimated them.
   6. Send the provisional result and its list of questions to your employer's payroll or HR team and ask them to confirm the final SMP decision and payment calculation.

   Prompt

   Help me make a provisional check of my UK Statutory Maternity Pay eligibility using only the current GOV.UK rules available on 2026-08-13. This is not professional advice and you must not present the result as a final decision.
   
   My details:
   - Employment start date: [date]
   - Expected week of childbirth: [date or unknown]
   - Planned maternity leave start date: [date or unknown]
   - Employer type and location within the UK: [details]
   - Employment status and contract: [details]
   - Gross pay and pay frequency: [details]
   - Relevant payslip amounts and dates: [details]
   - Any gaps, dismissal, redundancy, change of employer or recent job change: [details]
   - Any other fact that may affect eligibility: [details]
   
   First, list the exact facts needed to assess eligibility and mark anything missing or uncertain. Then explain which current GOV.UK condition each fact relates to. Calculate no figures unless they are copied directly from the information I provide, and show the relevant dates and pay evidence used. Give a provisional result of likely eligible, likely not eligible or cannot tell, with a separate explanation for each condition. Do not guess, fill gaps or rely on general memory. Link to the relevant GOV.UK pages. End with a short list of questions for my employer's payroll or HR team to confirm, including what evidence they should check. Do not ask for or repeat my National Insurance number or other unnecessary personal data.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.