DNA Paternity Test vs. Ancestry DNA Kits: What's the Difference?
Published January 21, 2026 · Medically reviewed by the partner laboratory's medical director, AABB-accredited relationship-testing laboratory
Consumer ancestry kits (23andMe, AncestryDNA) test hundreds of thousands of markers to estimate ethnic background — they are not designed to establish paternity. A dedicated paternity test uses 34 highly informative STR markers specifically chosen to determine parent-child biological relationships with 99.99%+ certainty.
Different tests, different goals
Ancestry kits look at Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) that reveal population-level genetic patterns. Paternity tests use Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) — the same markers used in courts, crime labs, and immigration cases worldwide because they're uniquely powerful for identifying direct biological relationships.
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Ancestry-kit "DNA relatives" is not paternity
Ancestry services do sometimes show close matches labeled 'father' or 'parent-child' — but these are probabilistic estimates based on shared centimorgan segments. They are not accepted anywhere as paternity evidence, and they cannot exclude with the certainty of a dedicated STR test.
When to use each
Use an ancestry kit for heritage. Use a dedicated paternity test — with an AABB-accredited lab — for the paternity question.