Child maintenance is regular, reliable financial support that helps towards a child's everyday living costs. The parent without the main day-to-day care of the child pays child maintenance to the other parent.
Child maintenance can make a real difference to children and give them the best start in life as it can help pay for things like clothing, food or other essentials. It could also help keep both parents involved with their children’s lives.
The quickest and easiest way to arrange child maintenance is for you and the other parent to set up an arrangement between yourselves. More than half a million children in the UK now benefit from this kind of family-based arrangement.
With a family arrangement, you and the other parent can arrange things in whichever way is best for your circumstances, either without involving others or with the help of family, friends, or a professional mediator. It doesn’t only have to be about money – if you both agree it can include other kinds of support, for example, providing school uniforms.
Unfortunately a family arrangement isn’t for everyone. If you don’t know where the other parent is, or domestic abuse or violence is involved, you might need to look at the other options. For example you can still make an arrangement using the CSA. You can also use a service called Maintenance Direct, where the CSA will work out how much and how often your payments should be but you set up and manage your own payments (with the other parent).
We're here to help you understand child maintenance and support you to put an arrangement in place
You can download our Getting started guide [PDF 473KB]
to get information about:
- the options available for arranging child maintenance
- how to prepare for making a child maintenance arrangement including a family arrangement
- how to talk about child maintenance with the other parent
- practical steps forward and useful organisations which can help you.
