This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
In this section, uptake rates of Paternity Benefit for fathers in employment are presented. A father in employment is defined here as one with a registered childbirth, and with recorded pay from an employment in a time window spanning 1 month before the birth of the child and up to 7 months after the birth. Note that at the time of publication there was no data available for 2024 or 2025 for those that were self-employed, hence these years have been excluded from this section of the analysis.
The uptake of Paternity Benefit for fathers in employment has been increasing since 2020, when it was 48.6%. In 2023 54.7% of fathers in employment availed of Paternity Benefit.
In 2023 fathers working in Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing (A) were least likely to claim Paternity Benefit, at 31%, while those working in Education (P) were most likely at 69.8%.
Paternity Benefit uptake rates rose across all but two sectors between 2022 and 2023. The exceptions were Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing (A) which fell from 34.3% to 31% and Other NACE Activities (R - U) which fell from 42.5% to 41.3%.
The trend in uptake rates of Paternity Benefit between 2019 and 2023 is shown in Figure 4.3, for selected NACE economic sectors.
The biggest change in a single year was for the Accommodation and Food Service Activities (I) sector between 2021 and 2022 when the uptake rate increased from 24.8% to 36%.
Paternity Benefit uptake rates were lowest in enterprises with 0 - 9 employees, at 36.7% in 2023, slightly up from 36.5% in 2022.
Rates were highest in enterprises with 250 and over employees, at 65.3% in 2023, up from 63.3% in 2022.
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