Editorial Policy

Child maintenance is a subject where getting it wrong costs people real money and real time with their children. Plenty of what is written about it online is recycled, out of date, or quietly slanted towards whoever is paying for the page. This document sets out how we try to do better, so you can judge for yourself whether to trust us.

Where our information comes from

We work from primary sources wherever possible. In practice that means:

• The legislation itself. The Child Support Act 1991 as amended, and the Child Support Maintenance Calculation Regulations 2012, which is where the rules that actually bind a caseworker live. When we cite a rule such as Regulation 50 on shared care, we have read it.
• Official DWP and CMS material.GOV.UK guidance, the CMS procedural guidance, statistical releases from the DWP's Child Maintenance Service statistics series, and departmental responses to Parliament.
• Parliamentary and committee evidence. Hansard, Work and Pensions Committee sessions, House of Lords debates, and written answers. These often reveal operational detail that never reaches GOV.UK.
• Freedom of Information responses. We submit and publish FOI requests to the DWP. You can read them in our FOI section. Where an FOI response contradicts public guidance, we say so.
• Tribunal and court decisions. Upper Tribunal decisions on child support are publicly reported and are binding on how the rules are applied.
• The Independent Case Examiner and the Ombudsman. Their annual reports show what actually goes wrong and how complaints get resolved.

Where a claim rests on a specific source, we link to it so you can check us. If we cannot substantiate something, we leave it out rather than hedge it.

What we will not do

• We do not publish avoidance schemes. People search for loopholes, and we do write about how income is assessed, including dividends, pension contributions and company structures. We explain how the rules work and where the CMS has powers to look through arrangements. We do not tell anyone how to hide income from an assessment for their children.
• We do not take sides between parents. The debate around the CMS is bitter and both paying and receiving parents have legitimate grievances. We write for both and label our guides by audience so you can find the ones aimed at your situation.
• We do not present opinion as fact. Where something is contested, uncertain, or a matter of caseworker discretion, we say so plainly instead of inventing false certainty.
• We do not publish AI generated content without human review. Drafting tools may assist, but every guide is checked against source material by a person before publication.

How our calculators are built

Our calculators and tools implement the statutory formula directly: the gross income bands, the basic and reduced rates, the 12, 16 and 19 per cent rates for one, two and three or more children, the relevant other children deduction, and the shared care bands from Regulation 50.

Our net pay calculator additionally reverses UK income tax and National Insurance to estimate gross income from take home pay, because that is how most people actually think about their wages. We update the tax thresholds each tax year.

We are explicit about the limits. A calculator cannot know about a variation application, a diversion of income finding, or a discretionary decision on your case. We say so on the tools themselves rather than burying it in the small print, and every tool runs in your browser so your figures are never sent to us.

Keeping content current

Child maintenance rules and CMS practice change regularly. We review our guides on a rolling basis and always after:

• A change to the Child Support Regulations
• The annual review cycle and any change to rates or thresholds
• A significant Upper Tribunal decision
• A quarterly DWP statistics release
• A reader telling us something looks wrong

Every article shows a published date and, where it has been revised, a last updated date. We do not refresh dates cosmetically to game search rankings. If the date changed, the content changed.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do, we want to know quickly. If you spot an error, tell us through the contact page and include the page and what you think is wrong.

Substantive errors are corrected as soon as we have verified the point, and the article's last updated date is changed. Where a correction materially changes the advice someone might have relied on, we note the change in the article rather than editing silently.

Advertising, affiliates and editorial independence

This site is free. It is paid for by advertising and by affiliate commission from some of the providers listed in our legal services section. That creates an obvious tension, so here is how we handle it.

• Advertisers have no input into, and no advance sight of, our editorial content. Ad placement is automated and we do not accept paid guest posts, sponsored articles, or paid links inside our guides.
• Affiliate links appear only in the legal services section, are marked as such, and carry the appropriate technical markup so search engines can see the relationship.
• Every legal services category also lists free, charitable and government options that pay us nothing, including Citizens Advice, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, Rights of Women and GOV.UK legal aid. Those listings are permanent and are not conditional on anything.
• We do not rank providers by commission rate, and we will remove a provider if we conclude they are not serving readers well, regardless of what they pay.
• Nothing on this site is a recommendation that a particular provider is right for you. We are not regulated to give that advice, and we say so in our terms.

Reader contributions and the forum

Our community forumcarries posts written by parents, not by us. We moderate for safety and privacy, particularly to stop anyone being identified, but we do not verify individual accounts of what happened on someone's case and we do not endorse them.

Reader experience does shape our editorial agenda. Recurring questions in the forum and through the contact form are a large part of how we decide what to write next, and several of our tools exist because enough people asked the same thing.

Who writes this

Our guides are produced by the Child Maintenance Guide UK editorial team, who research the underlying legislation, statistics and official guidance directly. We are not solicitors and we do not hold ourselves out as such. Where a question needs regulated advice, we say so and point you towards someone who can give it.

More about why the site exists is on our about page.