How Much the CMS Made From Collect and Pay Fees in 2025

The Child Maintenance Service's Collect and Pay service charges a 20% surcharge to paying parents and deducts 4% from every payment to receiving parents. These fees are presented as a cost-recovery mechanism. But how much money does that actually add up to?

Using the latest DWP Child Maintenance Service statistics (December 2025), we can calculate exactly what Collect and Pay fees generated — and what parents on both sides lost to them.

What Collect and Pay fees are

When a child maintenance case moves to Collect and Pay, the CMS steps in to collect money from the paying parent and transfer it to the receiving parent. For this, both parties are charged:

• Paying parent: pays an extra 20% on top of their assessed maintenance amount
• Receiving parent: has 4% deducted from every payment they receive

So on a £200/month maintenance assessment, the paying parent pays £240, the receiving parent receives £192, and the CMS keeps £48. That £48 represents a 24% total extraction on a single payment.

The 2025 numbers

In the full year to December 2025, £455.3 million was collected via Collect and Pay — a 16% increase on the £391 million collected in the year to December 2024. This is the base maintenance figure: the amount parents were assessed to pay.

Applying the fee structure to that £455.3 million:

In a single year, the CMS generated approximately £109 million in fee income from Collect and Pay. That is more than 10 times the total value of the £20 application fees it scrapped in February 2024.

What that looks like per quarter

In Q4 2025 alone, £84 million was collected via Collect and Pay (from a total due of £110.2 million — a 76% collection rate). The fees on that single quarter:

• Paying parents charged: £16.8 million in surcharges
• Receiving parents lost: £3.4 million in deductions
• Total fee extraction in Q4 alone: £20.2 million

That is over £20 million in a single quarter — a rate that, if sustained, would produce more than £80 million per year. The actual annual figure of £109 million reflects higher collection volumes earlier in the year.

The receiving parent's position

The 4% deduction is the part of this equation that often goes unnoticed. Receiving parents — who are already on the losing end of a non-payment dispute that forced them onto Collect and Pay in the first place — are charged for the privilege of the CMS collecting money they were always entitled to.

On an average Collect and Pay case of, say, £250/month in assessed maintenance, a receiving parent loses £10/month to fees. Over a year, that is £120. Over the life of a case lasting until a child turns 16, that could be over £1,400 deducted in fees from a parent who did nothing wrong.

Who ends up on Collect and Pay?

As of December 2025, 344,000 arrangements (43% of all CMS cases) were on Collect and Pay. In Q4 2025, 12,000 arrangements were escalated from Direct Pay to Collect and Pay — almost certainly because the paying parent stopped paying voluntarily.

Of those 344,000 paying parents on Collect and Pay:

• 75% paid some maintenance (up from 74% in Q3)
• 52% paid over 90% of what was due
• 25% — approximately 59,000 people — paid nothing at all

This means the CMS is collecting fees from families where one parent is already failing to pay. The receiving parent loses 4% of whatever partial payment does come through, while the non-paying parent faces no fee consequence for paying nothing.

How fees have grown

Collect and Pay volumes rose 16% year-on-year — from £391 million collected in the year to December 2024 to £455.3 million in the year to December 2025. As the CMS handles more cases and maintenance amounts increase (reflecting rising incomes assessed by HMRC), fee income grows proportionally.

If Collect and Pay volumes continue to grow at a similar rate, the CMS could be generating well over £120 million annually in fee income within two years — entirely funded by parents involved in the child maintenance system.

Context: the scrapped application fee

In February 2024, the £20 application fee for the receiving parent was abolished. The DWP cited this as a significant modernisation and an improvement in access to the service. Over the lifetime of the fee, it is estimated to have generated modest revenues — nothing close to the scale of Collect and Pay fee income.

The contrast is stark. A £20 one-off fee was criticised for years as a barrier to access and eventually scrapped. Meanwhile, a fee structure that extracts up to 24% of every payment processed through the CMS's most-used enforcement service has attracted far less political attention — despite generating more than £100 million per year.