Raising a child isn’t cheap, and it’s important to find a way to share this cost with your child’s other parent. The money that helps pay for a child’s everyday living costs is called child maintenance. This is paid by the parent who doesn’t usually live with the child (the ‘paying parent’) to the person who does the most day-to-day care of them (the ‘receiving parent’). You can either make arrangements privately with the other parent or go through the Child Maintenance Service (CMS).  

This page explains everything from how to apply to the CMS to how they work out your maintenance and how to complain if you need to.

Applying to the CMS

How much will I be paid?

What if we share the care of our child?

Problems with the CMS

If you’d like to get advice tailored to your circumstances, talk to us.

The CMS calculates how much child maintenance one parent should pay the other if you can’t decide this between you. You can use the service if you and the other parent live in the UK and your child is under 16, or under 20 and studying full-time for A-levels or equivalent.

To apply to the CMS, you first need to use the Get help arranging child maintenance service on gov.uk. This gives you information about getting support for your child, including how to make your own arrangement with the other parent (called a family-based arrangement). Through this service, you can get a reference number and start your application to the CMS.

You can only go directly to the CMS if you can’t use the online service.

The application process

If you’ve experienced domestic abuse, you should be able to claim child maintenance safely – see our page on this.

After you apply, the CMS will find out your child’s other parent’s income from HMRC (the tax office). Normally, the CMS will then get in touch with your child’s other parent to ask about their circumstances. They’ll usually also send them a calculation of how much child maintenance they’ll need to pay.

You should hear back from the CMS within 4 weeks. It might take longer if you don’t know where the other parent is and they have to be traced.

2 ways to be paid

The CMS can pay in 2 ways: direct pay and collect and pay. Most people start on direct pay and move on to collect and pay if they need to.

Direct pay

This is where CMS calculates your child maintenance and explains how much to pay, and your child’s other parent pays it directly to you. You and the other parent agree how and when to transfer the money. 

It’s usually better to have maintenance payments made by standing order into your bank account. That way you can keep track of the payments, and have a record if things go wrong.

Even though the CMS doesn’t deal with the payments for you, the payments still need to be made in full and on time. If they aren’t, you can tell the CMS and they’ll chase the other parent.

Collect and pay

This is when the CMS collects the money from your child’s other parent and pays it to you.

The paying parent has to pay an extra 20% for this (on top of the child maintenance amount). And your child maintenance payments are reduced by 4%.

Because of this cost, you can’t choose to use collect and pay if your child’s other parent would prefer to use direct pay. If the CMS thinks your child’s other parent is unlikely to pay, they can decide you shouldn’t be paid directly and will step in to collect the payments.

The CMS uses the paying parent’s weekly income before tax and National Insurance (gross income) to work out maintenance payments. This can include wages or income from a pension.

Other income, like interest on savings, income from a company or rent from a property is ignored in the initial calculations. Assets like savings and property are also usually ignored. If the paying parent has other income or savings, you can ask for these to be taken into account in the calculation.

The income of a paying parent’s partner is not included in the calculation.

There are different rates of child maintenance, depending on the paying parent’s income.

If your child spends exactly the same amount of time with both parents, neither has to pay child maintenance. This is the case even if one of you is much better off financially.

If your child’s other parent looks after them at least 1 night a week on average, the CMS sees this as sharing their care. And the amount of child maintenance you can get will be reduced if your child’s other parent looks after your child at least once a week (52 nights a year or more). 

If the other parent pays the reduced or basic rate of child maintenance, this will be reduced by:

If the other parent pays the flat rate of £7 a week, the calculation is more complicated. To find out more about how shared care affects the flat rate of child maintenance, talk to us.

If you can’t agree how to share your child’s care with their other parent, the CMS will assume they stay over once a week. If the other parent tells the CMS that your child is staying over with them more nights than they actually are, give the CMS as much evidence as you can to help with their decision.

If your child’s other parent has children from another relationship that they don’t live with, the maintenance they need to pay will be split between you and the other receiving parent. This is called apportionment.

Example of how shared care affects maintenance
Simon pays Lucy £28 a week for child maintenance as both children live with Lucy full time. Later on, both children start to stay over at Simon’s house 1 night a week. This means that the amount Simon pays Lucy reduces by 1/7th.

1/7th of 28 = £4

£28 – £4 = £24

Simon needs to pay £24 a week.