CMS Statistics: 1.1m Children and £791m Still Unpaid

The Government has published its latest quarterly statistics on the Child Maintenance Service, covering the three months to March 2026. They cover 810,000 arrangements, 1.1 million children and £405.1 million of maintenance due in a single quarter. They also record that £791.2 million has gone unpaid since the CMS opened its doors in 2012.

This article breaks down every headline figure, translates it into plain English, and pulls out what receiving and paying parents should actually take from it.

The key numbers at a glance

The CMS keeps getting bigger

Growth is the story that runs through the whole release. At the end of March 2026 the CMS was managing 810,000 arrangements for 730,000 paying parents, a 6% rise on March 2025 and a 2% rise in the space of a single quarter.

The number of children covered has reached 1.1 million, up 44,000 in a year. That is roughly the entire child population of a mid-sized British city being added to the caseload in twelve months.

Applications are falling, the caseload is not

New applications are going the other way. There were 38,000 in the quarter to March 2026, down 4,300 on the same quarter a year earlier, and 150,000 across the full year, a 1% fall.

A shrinking intake alongside a growing caseload only looks like a contradiction until you look at how long cases stay open. Once a family is in the CMS it tends to stay for years, especially where the paying parent is not complying and enforcement is grinding on in the background. Cases accumulate faster than they close.

Since November 2021 every applicant has had to pass through the Get Help Arranging Child Maintenance gateway before they can make a formal application. The gateway pushes parents towards a private arrangement first. A falling application count suggests it is filtering cases out, though nothing in the statistics tells you how many of those families genuinely did not need the CMS and how many were simply turned away from a system they could not face arguing with.

Direct Pay and Collect and Pay: the two-tier split

The CMS runs two service levels. Under Direct Pay it works out the figure and leaves the parents to move the money themselves, with no fees. Under Collect and Pay it takes the money from the paying parent and passes it on, charging the paying parent 20% on top and taking 4% out of what reaches the receiving parent.

The flow between the two services is where the interesting movement is. In the quarter to March 2026, 15,000 new applicants started on Direct Pay, 9,000 Direct Pay arrangements closed, and 12,000 arrangements were moved from Direct Pay across to Collect and Pay.

The number of arrangements sitting unassigned also crept up, from 11,000 to 13,000 in a single quarter. Those are families who have applied and are waiting to be put on a service.

Compliance: who is actually paying

Of the 240,000 paying parents due to pay through Collect and Pay in the quarter to March 2026, 77% paid something and 23% paid nothing at all.

It matters enormously what the CMS means by compliance. A paying parent counts as compliant if any money at all reaches the account, even a single pound. So the 77% headline sweeps in parents who paid a fraction of what they owed. Break it open and 54% paid over 90% of the quarter's liability, while 23% paid something up to 90%, which at the bottom of that band means almost the entire obligation went unmet. Only that top 54% looks like compliance to the parent waiting for the money.

Both measures moved the right way this quarter: paying something is up 2 percentage points and paying over 90% is up 1 point on the quarter ending December 2025.

The children behind the compliance figures

The release breaks the child numbers down by what actually happened to the money, which is where the statistics stop being administrative and start being uncomfortable.

86,000 children received nothing through Collect and Pay in a single quarter. Not a reduced amount, not a late payment. Nothing.

The money: what is due and what arrives

£405.1 million in maintenance was due across all CMS arrangements in the quarter to March 2026.

That £292.3 million of Direct Pay money is a figure the CMS calculates and then loses sight of. The department says plainly that it does not measure compliance on Direct Pay. Nobody checks. If the paying parent stops, it falls to the receiving parent to notice, report it and ask for the case to be moved.

Collect and Pay is the half we can see. £86.5 million of the £112.8 million due was collected, which is 77% of the money on the service the CMS actively polices. Across the full year, maintenance arranged through Collect and Pay rose 17%, from £376.1 million in the year to March 2025 to £440.6 million in the year to March 2026, reflecting both more cases and higher assessments.

The £791.2 million debt mountain

Since the CMS opened in December 2012, £791.2 million of maintenance has gone unpaid. The DWP puts that at 7% of everything ever due through the service.

Put that £791.2 million in proportion. It is not one bad year. It is every missed, short or uncollected payment stacked up across nearly fourteen years of operation, and at 7% of the total it also means the great majority of assessed maintenance has been paid. That is genuine context. It is also cold comfort to the individual parent whose share of the 7% is the difference between managing and not.

£26.3 million went uncollected in this quarter alone. Hold that rate for a year and Collect and Pay adds around £105 million to the pile, before you count a single pound of Direct Pay money that quietly never arrived and was never reported.

Enforcement: what is actually happening

When a paying parent on Collect and Pay stops paying, the CMS has a ladder of powers. Here is how much of that machinery was running at the end of March 2026.

Around 18,000 enforcement actions are live at any one time. The biggest slice is the 7,200 referrals to enforcement agents, who can attend a property and seize goods to sell against the debt. A further 5,400 deduction orders allow the CMS to take money straight out of a bank or building society account.

The 5,300 liability orders in process are the gateway. A liability order is the court order the CMS must obtain before it can reach for the serious powers: bailiffs, orders for sale, removing a driving licence or passport, and ultimately committal to prison. These are the cases that have crossed the formal legal threshold.

Set against all that, the CMS collected £5.2 million in the year to March 2026 from paying parents who had a sanctions action in process. Up from £4.9 million a year earlier, and still a small number against £791.2 million of accumulated debt.

How the money is actually taken

Of the 240,000 paying parents due to pay through Collect and Pay, the statistics show which mechanism was in place.

Benefit deductions are now the single largest mechanism, covering 39% of Collect and Pay paying parents, which tells you how much of this caseload sits on state support. Another 27% have a deduction from earnings order, where the employer takes the maintenance out of wages before the paying parent ever sees it. The remaining 34% are on other methods, predominantly a default standing order, which is to say the arrangement still depends on the paying parent choosing to let it run.

The Universal Credit change that moved the needle

The clearest cause of improving compliance in this release has nothing to do with bailiffs or courts. In April 2025 the Government moved child maintenance to the top of the Universal Credit deduction priority order, and allowed those deductions to exceed the usual 15% cap on total UC deductions where appropriate.

Before that, a UC claimant with several deductions running at once, rent arrears, benefit overpayments, advances and maintenance, could see child maintenance pushed down the queue and squeezed out once the cap was reached. Now it goes first.

The effect showed up in the receipts from the middle of June 2025, and between the quarters ending March 2025 and September 2025 the proportion of Collect and Pay parents paying something rose by 5 percentage points. The change was introduced temporarily in April 2025 and made permanent in April 2026.

Who the paying parents are

The release gives a demographic snapshot of the 730,000 paying parents on the books at March 2026.

The profile is unchanged from previous releases. The paying parent population is overwhelmingly male at 93% and clustered between 30 and 49 at 73%. That is not a quirk of the data, it reflects who tends to be the non-resident parent after a UK separation.

Of the 41% with two or more qualifying children, 79% have a single arrangement covering all of them and 21% have two or more, usually because the children are from different relationships with different receiving parents.

No equivalent demographic data is published for receiving parents.

What this means if you are a receiving parent

A 77% compliance headline sounds reassuring until you see what sits underneath it. Only 54% of paying parents on Collect and Pay covered more than 90% of what they owed. If your payments arrive erratically or fall short, the data says your experience is ordinary, not exceptional.

The £26.3 million unpaid in one quarter and the £791.2 million banked up since 2012 are not accounting entries. That is money that should have reached children and did not. If your case is one of the 61,000 where nothing was collected, the enforcement machinery is running, with 7,200 bailiff referrals and 5,300 liability orders live, but the queue is long relative to the number of cases in arrears, so keep a written record of every missed payment and every contact with the CMS.

If you are on Direct Pay and you suspect payments are being missed, take the department at its word: it does not measure Direct Pay compliance. That £292.3 million a quarter is taken entirely on trust. Nobody will spot a problem on your behalf. If money is not arriving, report it and ask for the case to be moved to Collect and Pay, which is the only route to any enforcement at all.

What this means if you are a paying parent

If you pay in full and on time you are in the larger group, and the enforcement machinery is not pointed at you. It engages where nothing is being collected.

If nothing is being collected on your case because you are disputing the assessment rather than avoiding it, the statistics will not distinguish you from anyone else. Enforcement can still start while a dispute is live. Ask for a mandatory reconsideration in writing, keep the reference number, and tell the CMS in the same letter that a dispute is outstanding.

If you think your assessment is wrong because the CMS is working from the wrong income, remember that a mid-year change needs a 25% swing in income before it triggers a reassessment outside the annual review. Anything smaller waits for the review date. Use the income change checker on this site to see where you stand.

If you are being moved onto Collect and Pay, you will pay a 20% collection fee on top of your maintenance. 12,000 arrangements made that move in this quarter alone, often after a single period of non-payment. Getting back onto Direct Pay afterwards requires the receiving parent's agreement and a track record of paying on time.

If you claim Universal Credit, the April 2026 permanent change matters to you directly. Child maintenance now sits at the top of the deduction order and can push total deductions past the usual 15% cap. If your UC payment has dropped further than you expected, that is why.

The bigger picture

Read the release as a whole and a consistent picture emerges. The caseload keeps growing even as applications fall, because cases arrive faster than they leave. Compliance on the only service the DWP actually monitors sits at 77% paying something, with a floor of 23% paying nothing and a ceiling of 54% paying more than 90% of what is owed. The debt grows by roughly £105 million a year inside Collect and Pay alone. Enforcement is busy, with around 18,000 actions in flight, yet recovered £5.2 million across a full year.

The genuinely encouraging signal is the Universal Credit priority change, now permanent. It shows that fixing how the benefits and maintenance systems talk to each other shifts compliance at a scale no amount of individual case enforcement can match. Whether the department builds on that, and whether the long-promised reforms to Direct Pay ever reach the statute book, is the question the next few releases will answer.

For the 1.1 million children whose support depends on this system working, none of that is an abstract policy debate. It is the measure of whether the state is doing its job.