The statute says 100%. The ceiling decides what you get.

By Skyler Bissell · August 17, 2026 · 9 min read

Spain's maternity system says 100%. At a €129,000 Madrid salary, the whole statutory leave package replaces 47.5% of pay. The UK's says 90% and pays 20.9% in London. Korea's headline is the most generous-sounding in our data and lands at 19.3% in Seoul. The word in the statute and the money in the account are two different quantities, and the gap between them is a ceiling.

This page prices that gap for one earner in fifteen cities, using the same engine that powers our city comparisons. If you are planning a family around a percentage you read somewhere, this is the number to check first.

The three shapes of maternity pay

Every statutory scheme we model is built from three parts, in different mixes.

A percentage of your wage. Germany's Mutterschutz weeks pay full salary. Spain pays 100% of the contribution base. This is the shape the headlines quote.

A percentage with a ceiling. The percentage applies until the benefit hits a fixed monthly, weekly or daily maximum, and then the maximum is what you get. Germany's Elterngeld caps at €1,800 a month, France's maternity daily allowance at €104 a day, Sweden's sjukpenning-based leave at SEK 8,813 a week. Below the ceiling the headline is real. Above it, your benefit is the cap.

A flat amount. No percentage at all: a fixed sum per week, whatever you earned. The UK's standard maternity pay weeks pay £194 a week after the first six, Ireland's maternity benefit is €299 a week, Denmark's barselsdagpenge caps out at DKK 5,085 a week. For a high earner a flat benefit is a rounding error on the payslip, and that is what drags the UK and Ireland to the bottom of the table below.

Fifteen cities, one salary, ranked by what they pay

One single earner on a $150,000-equivalent salary, run through each city's statutory package. The weeks column is the whole household-inclusive statutory entitlement our engine stores; the effective rate blends every tier of it, ceilings and all.

cityparity engine figures, 2026, for a single earner on a $150,000-equivalent salary converted at build-time rates. Weeks are the full household-inclusive statutory package; the effective rate blends every percentage, cap and flat tier in it, and the package value is weeks times that rate times weekly gross, in local currency. Oslo, Sao Paulo and Milan were absent from this table at first publish while their statutory ceilings went unmodelled; the engine now prices Norway's 6G basis cap and Brazil's constitutional teto, and Italy's tiers were verified against the consolidated statute as genuine uncapped shares of pay, so all three rows are here on the same footing as the rest. All 70 countries on one page: parental leave by country.

Three readings jump out. Sao Paulo leads at 72.5% because Brazil's ceiling is not a social-insurance cap but the constitutional limit on public-sector pay, R$46,366 a month, which trims far less from this salary than any European ceiling, across a short 18-week entitlement. Seattle's 57.1% comes from Washington paying a high rate over one of the shortest entitlements here, and rate is what this table ranks. And Seoul, whose 120 weeks make Korea's package the longest in our data, pays 19.3% at this salary, because ₩1,935,000 a month stretches over a wage many times that size.

Berlin, line by line

Germany is the cleanest illustration because both shapes sit in one package. The first stretch is Mutterschutz: about 14 weeks around the birth at full pay, with the employer topping up the health insurer's allowance to the mother's net wage, per the Bundesministerium fuer Familie (BMFSFJ). No ceiling that a salaried employee will ever meet.

Then comes Elterngeld: 65% of prior net income, capped at €1,800 a month. On a €129,000 Berlin salary the 65% would be worth far more than the cap, so the cap is the benefit, and it replaces about a sixth of gross for every Elterngeld week. Blend the full-pay weeks with the capped ones and the package lands at 34.3%, worth €57,015 across 67 weeks.

One more German cliff sits above this page's salary. Elterngeld has an income eligibility ceiling of EUR 175,000 of household income, and a household above it gets nothing for those weeks at all. Our single earner here sits under the line, so the cap sets the rate. The two-earner household in parental leave vs paternity leave sits above it, and every one of its 53 Elterngeld weeks pays zero. Same city, same statute, two families, two answers.

How to read a leave promise

Three checks turn a headline into a payslip estimate. First, find the ceiling: every scheme document names one, usually in a different unit than the rate (a daily allowance in France, a weekly benefit in Washington, a monthly cap in Germany and Korea), and the unit switch is where readers lose track. Second, divide the ceiling by your own pay for the same period; that quotient is your effective rate for the capped weeks, and everything above the ceiling is money the statute never promised you. Third, ask what the employer adds on top, because collective agreements and company policies routinely top statutory pay up to full salary for a stretch, and that difference is invisible in every table of statutory rates, including ours.

The UK is worth a worked glance because its structure fools people twice. GOV.UK states the scheme plainly: 90% of average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, then a flat statutory rate for up to 33 more. The 90% weeks are real and uncapped. There are six of them. The other 35 paid weeks are flat, which is why a London professional's package averages 20.9% and why "the UK pays 90%" is true in the same way "Spain pays 100%" is true: for a slice of the calendar, at some salaries.

Where this lands in a relocation decision depends on the whole household ledger, which is what the city pages price end to end. Seattle vs Berlin for a family and Seattle vs Stockholm for a family both carry the leave line alongside childcare, healthcare and taxes, and the rest of the non-cash package is priced in the hidden paycheck. The same reading trap in cash form, a monthly figure that means less than it seems, is covered in what is 13th month pay.

FAQ

Which countries pay maternity leave at 100% with no cap?

At a professional salary, almost none. Statutes that say 100% nearly always attach a ceiling somewhere: Spain caps at the social security contribution base, the Netherlands at the UWV daily maximum, Norway at six times the national insurance base amount, Brazil at the constitutional ceiling on public-sector pay. The closest thing to an exception in our data is Italy, whose maternity, paternity and parental tiers are genuine uncapped shares of actual pay for employees, but its honest blended rate is 60%, not 100%. Our engine prices each ceiling at your salary, which is why the table above reads lower than the statutes' own numbers.

Is maternity leave full pay in the US?

There is no federal paid maternity leave in the United States. FMLA guarantees 12 weeks of job protection and no pay. What exists is a patchwork of state programs: Washington's Paid Family and Medical Leave pays up to 90% of wages with a weekly benefit cap, California, New York, New Jersey and a handful of others run their own schemes, and Texas runs none. On the same federal law, the same worker gets a five-figure benefit in Seattle and zero in Austin.

Why does the replacement rate fall as salary rises?

Because the ceiling is a fixed cash amount and the salary grows past it. A cap of EUR 1,800 a month is most of a junior salary and a small fraction of a senior one, so the same statute replaces a smaller share of pay at every step up the ladder. Flat-rate schemes such as the UK's standard maternity pay weeks have the same shape in stronger form: the benefit is a fixed sum whatever you earned, so the effective rate is simply that sum divided by your wage.

Do employers top up statutory maternity pay?

Often, and it changes the answer materially. Collective agreements and individual employers frequently top statutory benefits up to full salary for some months, especially in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and large UK and US employers. The figures on this page are the statutory floor: what the law guarantees if the contract says nothing. When comparing offers, ask specifically whether the employer tops up, to what percentage, and for how many weeks, because two offers in the same city can differ by months of full pay.

A percentage without its ceiling is an advertisement. Find the cap, divide by your wage, and you have the number the brochure left out. Compare two cities with the leave line priced in and the family math stops running on headlines.

Sources. Scheme structures: GOV.UK on statutory maternity pay, the BMFSFJ on Elterngeld, and the OECD Family Database for cross-country leave design. Weeks, caps and effective rates are computed by cityparity's per-city engine from each scheme's stored tiers; per-field provenance is in data/_meta.json.

Statutory rates shown are the legal floor for an employed parent; collective agreements and employer policies can pay more. See the methodology.