Terms of Use

1. Agreement to these terms

By using child-maintenance.com you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

2. This is information, not advice

Everything published here is general information only. We are not a law firm, we are not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and we are not authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority. Nothing on this site creates a solicitor and client relationship or any professional duty of care between us and you.

Child maintenance outcomes depend heavily on individual circumstances. Two cases that look identical on paper can produce very different results once a caseworker applies the regulations, considers variations, and weighs the evidence each parent has supplied. For advice on your own situation you should speak to a qualified family law solicitor, to Citizens Advice, or to the CMS directly on 0800 171 2345.

3. We are not the government

This is an independent website. We have no affiliation with the Child Maintenance Service, the Department for Work and Pensions, HMRC, or any other government body. We are not able to look up your case, change your calculation, chase a payment, or speak to the CMS on your behalf.

The official service is at gov.uk/child-maintenance-service. Where our guidance and GOV.UK disagree, treat GOV.UK as authoritative and please tell us so we can correct the error.

4. Accuracy and the limits of our calculators

We work hard to keep our content accurate and current, and we describe how in our editorial policy. Even so, we cannot guarantee that everything on the site is complete, current or free from error. Legislation, case law, CMS operational practice and tax thresholds all change, sometimes without much notice.

Our calculators in particular have real limitations:

• They apply the standard statutory formula. They cannot know about variations, special expenses, diversion of income findings, or discretionary decisions a caseworker has made on your case.
• Our net pay calculator estimates gross income from take home pay using standard UK tax and National Insurance rates. If your tax code is non standard, or you have benefits in kind, student loan deductions or multiple employments, the estimate will drift.
• The CMS uses gross income figures supplied by HMRC for a specific tax year. That figure may differ from what you currently earn.

A figure from our tools is a useful starting point for a conversation. It is not a CMS decision and cannot be relied on as one.

5. Letters and documents generated by our tools

Several of our tools produce draft letters, including complaint letters and mandatory reconsideration requests. These are templates. You are responsible for checking that the content is true, accurate and appropriate to your case before you send it to anyone. We accept no responsibility for the consequences of a letter you send, including missed deadlines, or for statements you make in it.

Deadlines in the child maintenance system are strict. A mandatory reconsideration normally has to be requested within one month of the decision. Check your own dates carefully.

6. The community forum

Our forum lets parents share experiences. Posts are written by members of the public, not by us. Their opinions are their own and we do not endorse or verify them.

When posting you must not:

• Identify your ex partner, a caseworker or a child, whether by name, photo, employer or any other detail that would let a reader work out who they are
• Post anything defamatory, harassing, threatening, discriminatory or obscene
• Post case reference numbers, National Insurance numbers or bank details
• Share content that breaches a court order, including anything covered by reporting restrictions in family proceedings
• Advertise, spam, or post affiliate links of your own
• Impersonate anyone, including staff of this site or of the CMS

We may remove any post and suspend any account at our discretion, without notice. By posting you grant us a non exclusive, royalty free licence to host, display and, where useful to other readers, quote your post on the site.

Family proceedings involving children are generally private. Publishing information about them can be a contempt of court. If in doubt, leave it out.

7. Advertising and affiliate relationships

This site is free to use and is funded by advertising and by affiliate commission. If you click certain links in our legal services section and go on to purchase, we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Those links are disclosed.

We are not responsible for the services provided by any third party we link to, and listing a provider is not a recommendation that they are right for you. Always check a solicitor's regulatory status on the Law Society register before instructing them.

8. Intellectual property

The written guides, tools, calculators, design and branding on this site are our property or are licensed to us, and are protected by copyright. You may read, print and share our pages for your own personal, non commercial use, and you may quote a short extract if you credit us and link back to the page.

You may not republish substantial portions of our content, scrape the site systematically, use it to train a commercial machine learning model, or present our material as your own.

Content sourced from GOV.UK and other public sector bodies is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

9. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its servers or any connected database
• Introduce malware, or launch a denial of service attack or anything similar
• Use automated tools to submit our forms or overload our endpoints
• Use the site for any unlawful purpose

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude liability for any loss or damage arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site. That includes financial loss, loss of an opportunity, loss arising from a decision you took in reliance on our content or our calculators, and any loss caused by content posted by other users.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect your statutory rights.

11. Availability

We provide the site free of charge and give no guarantee that it will be available without interruption. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site, including any tool, at any time.

12. Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms from time to time. The version published here is the one that applies, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed.