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, covering the year to March 2026, we can work out 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 2026 numbers

In the full year to March 2026, £440.6 million of maintenance was arranged through Collect and Pay. A 17% increase on the £376.1 million arranged in the year to March 2025. This is the base maintenance figure: the amount parents were assessed to pay, before any fee is added.

The two fees do not sit on the same base. The 20% surcharge is added to the paying parent's assessed liability, so it is charged on everything arranged. The 4% deduction only bites when money actually moves, and in the quarter to March 2026 the CMS collected £86.5 million of the £112.8 million due, a 77% collection rate. Applying each fee to its own base:

Collect and Pay fee extraction, year to March 2026

Base maintenance arranged £440.6 million
Extra charged to paying parents (20%) £88.1 million
Deducted from receiving parents (4% of money collected) approx. £13.5 million
Total charged and deducted approx. £102 million

Base figures from DWP CMS Statistics, data to March 2026. The 4% line applies the quarter's 77% collection rate across the year, because the DWP does not publish an annual collected total.

So Collect and Pay fees run at roughly £100 million a year. That is many times over the total value of the £20 application fee the DWP scrapped in February 2024.

What that looks like per quarter

Take the quarter to March 2026 on its own. £112.8 million was arranged through Collect and Pay and £86.5 million of it was collected. The fees on that single quarter:

  • Paying parents charged: £22.6 million in surcharges on top of their assessments
  • Receiving parents lost: £3.5 million deducted from money that did arrive
  • Total fee extraction in one quarter: £26.1 million

Over £26 million in three months, taken from families who are in the system precisely because a maintenance arrangement broke down.

The receiving parent's position

The 4% deduction is the part of this equation that usually goes unnoticed. The receiving parent had no say in the case moving to Collect and Pay, and is then charged for the CMS collecting money the children were always entitled to.

On a Collect and Pay case of, say, £250 a month in assessed maintenance, the receiving parent loses £10 a month to fees. Over a year that is £120. Across a case running until a child turns 16, it can pass £1,400 taken out of money meant for the children, whatever the rights and wrongs of why the case ended up on that service.

Worth noting: The 4% deduction applies to every payment passed through Collect and Pay, including payments by paying parents who are complying perfectly. A paying parent who pays in full and on time under Collect and Pay (because they were previously on Direct Pay and a single dispute triggered the switch) pays 20% extra and the receiving parent loses 4%, even though both parties may be perfectly willing to pay and receive without CMS involvement.

Who ends up on Collect and Pay?

At March 2026, 350,000 arrangements (43% of all CMS cases) were on Collect and Pay. In that quarter alone, 12,000 arrangements were moved across from Direct Pay, usually after payments stopped arriving. The DWP does not publish the reasons behind each move.

Of the 240,000 paying parents due to pay through Collect and Pay in the quarter:

  • 77% paid some maintenance, up 2 percentage points on the previous quarter
  • 54% paid over 90% of what was due
  • 23%: around 57,000 people. Paid nothing at all

So the CMS is charging fees to families whose arrangement has already broken down, and charging both sides of it. The receiving parent loses 4% of whatever does come through. The 20% surcharge only bites on money the paying parent actually pays, so it lands hardest on the parents who are paying and does nothing to the cases where no money is moving at all.

How fees have grown

Collect and Pay volumes rose 17% year on year, from £376.1 million arranged in the year to March 2025 to £440.6 million in the year to March 2026. As the caseload grows and assessments rise with the incomes HMRC reports, fee income climbs with it.

Keep that growth rate up and the CMS will be charging well over £130 million a year within two years. Entirely funded by parents already inside 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 takes up to 24% of every payment processed through the CMS's most-used enforcement service has attracted far less political attention. Despite running at around £100 million a year.

Bottom line: in the year to March 2026 the CMS charged paying parents around £88 million in surcharges and took roughly £13.5 million out of the payments reaching receiving parents. A combined £100 million or so. This is not government revenue in the ordinary sense. It comes straight out of the maintenance budgets of families already dealing with one of the hardest parts of separation.
What about the promised 2% fees? In June 2025 the Government announced it would abolish Direct Pay and move every case onto a collection service, with proposed fees of 2% for receiving parents and 2% for compliant paying parents, rising to 20% for those who do not comply. None of that has been legislated. It is a proposal with a target of 2027 to 2028, and the 20% and 4% fees described above are what apply today.