CMS Statistics December 2025: 1.1 Million Children, £773M Unpaid: What the Data Really Shows

The Government has released its latest quarterly statistics on the Child Maintenance Service, covering the period to December 2025. The data covers 800,000 arrangements, 1.1 million children, and nearly £400 million in maintenance due in a single quarter. It also reveals that £772.9 million in maintenance has gone unpaid since the CMS launched in 2012.

This article breaks down every major figure, explains what it means in plain English, and draws out what receiving and paying parents need to take from it.

The key numbers at a glance

The CMS is growing significantly

The headline story from this release is growth. At the end of December 2025, the CMS was managing 800,000 arrangements, up 6% from the 755,000 recorded a year earlier. The number of paying parents in the system rose from 680,000 to 720,000 in the same period.

The number of children covered by CMS arrangements has reached 1.1 million, an increase of 47,000 children in a single year. That is roughly the equivalent of adding the entire child population of a mid-sized UK city to the system in twelve months.

Applications: stable, not surging

Despite the growing caseload, the number of new applications coming in each quarter is broadly flat. There were 34,000 new applications in Q4 2025, down slightly from 34,700 in Q4 2024, and representing a 1% increase across the full year.

This apparent contradiction - a growing caseload with flat applications despite rising case numbers - is explained by the fact that cases are accumulating faster than they are closing. Once a case enters the CMS, it often stays for years, particularly if the paying parent is non-compliant and enforcement is ongoing.

Since November 2021, all new applicants must first go through the "Get Help Arranging Child Maintenance" (GHACM) gateway before they can make a formal CMS application. The gateway encourages parents to reach a private arrangement first. The relatively flat application rate suggests this gateway is filtering some cases before they reach the CMS, though it is difficult to determine how many families who needed formal help were instead redirected without adequate support.

Direct Pay vs Collect and Pay: the two-tier system

The CMS operates two main service types. Under Direct Pay, the CMS calculates the maintenance amount but leaves parents to arrange payment between themselves. Under Collect and Pay, the CMS intervenes, collecting money from the paying parent and transferring it to the receiving parent, but charging fees to both parties for doing so.

One figure that deserves particular attention is the flow between services: 12,000 arrangements transitioned from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay in Q4 2025 alone. This is a substantial number. It means that in a single quarter, 12,000 paying parents who were supposedly paying voluntarily under Direct Pay were escalated into the more interventionist (and more expensive for both parties) Collect and Pay service.

Compliance: who is actually paying?

Of the 240,000 paying parents on the Collect and Pay service in Q4 2025, the CMS reports that 75% paid some maintenance and 25% paid nothing at all.

It is important to understand what "compliance" means in CMS terms. The CMS defines a paying parent as compliant if any money was paid toward their maintenance liability, even £1. This means the 75% compliance rate includes parents who paid only a fraction of what they owed. Looking at the breakdown, 52% paid over 90% of what was due, but 24% paid between 51% and 90%, meaning up to half their obligation went unpaid. Only the 52% who paid over 90% come close to what receiving parents would call genuinely compliant.

Both payment metrics improved by 1 percentage point compared to Q3 2025. The statistics link this to changes in how Universal Credit debt repayments are prioritised, a change that took effect from mid-June 2025 (discussed in more detail below).

The money: what's due and what's collected

In Q4 2025, £398.5 million in maintenance was due across all CMS arrangements. Of that:

The £288.4 million due under Direct Pay is a figure the CMS calculates but cannot directly verify was received. Under Direct Pay, parents arrange payment between themselves. The CMS sets the amount but does not handle the money. If the paying parent is not paying, it is up to the receiving parent to flag it and request escalation to Collect and Pay.

The Collect and Pay figure is more verifiable. Of the £110.2 million due in Q4 2025, £84 million was collected (76%) and £26.2 million was not. Across the full year to December 2025, Collect and Pay arranged maintenance totalled £455.3 million, a 16% increase on the £391 million recorded in the year to December 2024. This growth reflects both rising case numbers and rising assessment amounts.

The £772.9 million debt mountain

Since the Child Maintenance Service launched in December 2012, a total of £772.9 million in maintenance has been recorded as unpaid. The DWP notes that this figure represents approximately 7% of all maintenance ever due since the CMS began.

To put the £772.9 million figure in perspective: it is not a shortfall for one year. It is the accumulated total of every missed, underpaid, or uncollected maintenance payment across the entire lifetime of the CMS, now approaching 13 years of operation. Even so, its 7% share of all maintenance due shows that the majority of payments have been made. But for the receiving parents affected, the individual amounts can be life-changing.

In Q4 2025 alone, £26.2 million in Collect and Pay maintenance went uncollected. At that quarterly rate, arrears are growing by roughly £100 million per year within the Collect and Pay service alone, before accounting for the unknown amount of unpaid Direct Pay maintenance that never gets reported.

Enforcement: what is actually happening

When a paying parent does not pay, the CMS has a suite of enforcement powers. The statistics show three enforcement categories with actions in progress at the end of December 2025:

In total, approximately 18,000 enforcement actions are in progress at any one time. The largest category is enforcement agent (bailiff) referrals at 7,100, meaning the CMS has referred that many cases to enforcement agents who can attend a debtor's property to seize goods. A further 5,600 deduction orders are in place, allowing the CMS to take money directly from bank accounts.

The 5,200 liability orders in process is the gateway figure. A liability order is a court order that must be granted before the CMS can pursue the most serious enforcement actions (bailiffs, charging orders, committal to prison). These are cases where enforcement has reached its formal legal threshold.

The CMS also collected £4.9 million specifically from paying parents who had sanctions actions in progress during the year to December 2025.

How payment is being collected on Collect and Pay

Of the 240,000 paying parents on Collect and Pay, the statistics show how payments are being collected:

The largest payment mechanism is benefit deductions: 38% of Collect and Pay paying parents have maintenance taken directly from their Universal Credit or other benefit payments. This reflects the significant overlap between the Collect and Pay population and those receiving state support. A further 28% are subject to deduction from earnings orders, where maintenance is taken directly from wages by the employer before the paying parent ever sees the money.

The Universal Credit effect: a small but real improvement

The 1 percentage point improvement in compliance in Q4 2025 (rising from 74% to 75% paying something) has a specific cause: a change in how Universal Credit prioritises debt repayments, which came into effect in mid-June 2025.

Before this change, when a Universal Credit claimant had multiple deductions being taken, including rent arrears, benefit overpayments, and child maintenance - the order in which those deductions were applied could result in child maintenance being pushed down the priority list, particularly when total deductions approached or exceeded the cap. The June 2025 change adjusted this prioritisation, meaning child maintenance deductions are now more reliably collected before some other debt types.

The result is measurable but modest. A 1 percentage point improvement across 240,000 paying parents means roughly 2,400 additional parents made at least some payment in Q4 compared to Q3, a real improvement, but a reminder of how many systemic levers affect whether children actually receive support.

Who are the paying parents?

The statistics provide a demographic snapshot of the 720,000 paying parents registered with the CMS at December 2025:

The demographic profile is consistent with previous releases. The CMS paying parent population is overwhelmingly male (93%) and concentrated in the 30–49 age bracket (73%). This is not a statistical outlier - it reflects the structure of separation patterns in the UK, where in most cases (though not all) the father is the non-resident parent.

Of the 41% with two or more qualifying children, 79% had a single CMS arrangement covering all their children, while 21% had two or more separate arrangements, typically because the children are from different relationships and different receiving parents are involved.

No comparable demographic data is published for receiving parents in this release.

What this means if you are a receiving parent

The headline compliance rate of 75% sounds relatively positive, but it conceals wide variation in how much is actually being paid. If you are receiving maintenance via Collect and Pay and payments feel inconsistent or inadequate, the data confirms that your experience is not unusual: only 52% of paying parents on Collect and Pay paid over 90% of what was due.

The £26.2 million unpaid in a single quarter, and the £772.9 million accumulated since 2012, are not abstract figures. They represent money that should have reached children and did not. If your paying parent is among the 25% who paid nothing on Collect and Pay, there are 7,100 enforcement agent referrals currently in the system, which suggests the CMS is actively pursuing cases, though the enforcement queue is long relative to the number of non-payers.

If your case is on Direct Pay and you suspect payments are not being made, the statistics offer an important reminder: the CMS cannot verify Direct Pay money unless you flag it. The £288.4 million due under Direct Pay each quarter is essentially taken on trust. If there is any doubt about whether you are actually receiving what is due, contact the CMS and ask for a review. If payments are not being made, the case can be escalated to Collect and Pay.

What this means if you are a paying parent

If you are paying consistently and correctly, the data suggests you are in the majority: 52% of Collect and Pay paying parents paid over 90% of what was due, and the vast majority of Direct Pay arrangements are presumed to be working. The system is growing and more families are entering it, but the compliance and enforcement machinery is primarily focused on those who are not paying.

If your maintenance amount feels incorrect and you believe the CMS is using the wrong income figure, the 25% income change threshold for a supersession review means you need a significant change in earnings to trigger a reassessment outside the annual review cycle. Use the income change checker on this site to see where you stand.

If you are being moved from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay, you will face a 20% surcharge on top of your maintenance amount. The data shows 12,000 paying parents were escalated in Q4 2025 alone, often because of a single period of non-payment. Once on Collect and Pay, returning to Direct Pay requires a track record of consistent payment.

The bigger picture: a system under sustained pressure

Reading all these figures together, a clear picture emerges. The CMS is managing a growing caseload with a steady applications rate, which means cases accumulate. Compliance on the most closely monitored service (Collect and Pay) stands at 75% paying something, but with a hard floor of 25% paying nothing, and a ceiling of only 52% paying over 90% of what is due. The debt mountain grows by roughly £100 million per year in Collect and Pay alone. Enforcement actions are numerous but their collective £4.9 million recovery in a full year is modest against the scale of non-payment.

The one genuinely positive signal is the Universal Credit priority change, which demonstrates that systemic improvements - specifically changes to how the benefits and maintenance systems interact - can move the compliance needle in a way that individual case enforcement cannot match at scale. Whether further such improvements are planned, and whether the Treasury will fund a more proactive enforcement operation, remains to be seen.

For the 1.1 million children whose financial support depends on this system working, these are not abstract policy questions. They are a measure of whether the state is doing its job.