Use the Child Maintenance Service or Child Support Agency (CSA)

1. Overview

Child maintenance is financial support towards your child’s everyday living costs when you’ve separated from the other parent.

You and your ex-partner can arrange child maintenance yourself if you can agree. This is called a ‘family-based arrangement’.

A family-based arrangement is a private way to sort out child maintenance. Parents arrange everything themselves and no-one else has to be involved.

Talk to Child Maintenance Options to get impartial information.

The Child Maintenance Service is for when you and the other parent can’t agree to a family-based arrangement.

You must talk to Child Maintenance Options before you can apply to the Child Maintenance Service.

The Child Maintenance Service can:

try to find the other parent if you don’t know where they live, to sort out child maintenance
sort out disagreements about parentage
work out how much child maintenance should be paid
arrange for the ‘paying’ parent to pay child maintenance - the parent who doesn’t have main day-to-day care of the child
pass payments on to the ‘receiving’ parent - the parent who has main day-to-day care of the child
look at the payments again when changes in parents’ circumstances are reported
review the payment amount every year
take action if payments aren’t made

The CSA only handles existing cases. New applications are dealt with by the Child Maintenance Service.

Child maintenance arrangements made through the CSA will be ending between now and 2017.

You can ask someone else to deal with your Child Maintenance Service case for you.