Child maintenance - Child Support Agency

What is Child maintenance?
It is regular, reliable financial support that helps towards a child's everyday living costs. The parent without day to day care of the child (the non-resident parent) pays child maintenance to the parent with the day to day care (the parent with care). In some cases, the person receiving child maintenance can be a grandparent or guardian.

How is Child Maintenance worked out?
When the Child Support Agency (CSA) arrange child maintenance, they use information given to them by both parents to decide if someone has to pay child maintenance and to work out how much maintenance should be paid. The CSA may also use information from other sources including the non-resident parent's employer or HM Revenue & Customs.

They work out child maintenance by applying one of 4 rates to the nonresident parent’s “net weekly income”. Income is earnings, money from an occupational or personal pension, certain benefits and in certain circumstances tax credits. Net weekly income is the amount of income you are left with after paying things like income tax, National Insurance and contributions to a pension scheme. If the pension scheme is set up to repay a mortgage, only 75% of the money paid into the scheme can be taken away from your gross (total) income, so your net weekly income includes 25% of any mortgage-linked pension contribution.

The 4 rates the CSA apply are:

• Basic rate (if they have an income of£200 a week or more)
• Reduced rate (if their income is more than £100 but less than £200 a week)
• Flat rate (if their income is £5 to £100 a week), and
• Nil rate (if their income is less than £5 a week).

Other factors, such as whether the nonresident parent or their partner are getting benefits, can also affect which rate applies.

The CSA will then adjust the child maintenance based on:

• The number of other children living with the non-resident parent for whom they or their partner get child benefit;
• The number of children the nonresident parent needs to pay child maintenance for; and
• Whether the child stays with the non-resident parent at least one night every week.

What if the child regularly stays overnight with the non-resident parent?
If this happens, the non-resident parent is helping to pay for the child’s everyday living costs, so the CSA can reduce the amount of child maintenance they have to pay. The CSA can only do this if they receive information that shows the child stays with the non-resident parent on average at least one night a week.

Is there anything else taken into account when working out child maintenance?
In some situations, either the nonresident parent or the parent with care can ask the CSA to take into account other factors, such as:

• Having to care for a disabled child;
• Having particularly high travel costs to see a child or children;
• Changes in a non-resident parent’s income where they can control the amount they get back; or
• Where a non-resident parent’s lifestyle suggests they have access to more money or a higher income than the income the CSA used to work out child maintenance.

Child Support Agency
The Child Support Agency is the Government’s child maintenance service. It is provided by the Child Maintenance and Enforcement Commission.

The CSA’s role is to make sure that parents who live apart from their children contribute towards their children’s upkeep by paying child maintenance.

The CSA use a standard process to work out how much child maintenance should be paid in each case, and to manage the payments.

The CSA can take legal action if the right amount of money is not paid at the right time.

To get help or more information, please visit the Child Support Agency’s website or phone them:

Web site: www.csa.gov.uk
Telephone: 0845 713 3133 or 0845 713 8924

If you have any questions or need any further advice, please do not hesitate to contact us and we will do our best to accommodate you.