CMS Fee Calculator

What Collect and Pay costs in real pounds

The percentages sound small. Applied to a full year of maintenance they are not. The paying parent hands over 20% more than the assessment says, the receiving parent gets 4% less than the assessment says, and the gap between the two households is 24% of the maintenance figure.

Three worked examples, using the standard basic rates on gross weekly income.

The third row uses the basic plus band, where 12% applies to the first £800 of gross weekly income and 9% applies to the slice above it. Anything over £3,000 a week is ignored entirely by the formula, and a receiving parent who wants more than that has to go to court for a top-up order under section 8 of the Child Support Act 1991. If you want to see where your own figure comes from before applying fees to it, the main CMS calculator shows the working band by band.

Why one parent pays 20% and the other pays 4%

The split is deliberate. Collect and Pay exists because a payment arrangement has broken down or was never trusted to work, and the heavier charge falls on the paying parent as the price of that. The 4% on the receiving parent is a contribution to the running cost of the service they are using, and it is deducted from money passing through rather than billed separately.

The practical effect is that the paying parent carries roughly five times the cost of the same transaction. It also means the two parents have opposite incentives on the same question. The paying parent has an obvious financial reason to want Direct Pay. The receiving parent loses 4% but gains a collection service with enforcement attached, and for many people that trade is worth making. Our breakdown of how much the CMS collects in fees puts the national numbers alongside the individual ones.

The £20 application fee no longer exists

Opening a CMS case is free. The £20 application fee, paid by whichever parent applied, was removed on 26 February 2024 by the Child Support (Management of Payments and Arrears and Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2024. It has not come back.

It is worth saying plainly because the fee is still repeated across a lot of advice pages, forum threads and law firm guides that were written before the change and never revisited. If you have been told you need to pay £20 to apply, you do not. The only charges left in the system are the 20% and 4% Collect and Pay fees above, and those only apply once a case is actually on Collect and Pay.

How to get a case moved to Direct Pay

Start from the position that you are asking, not demanding. There is no legal right to Direct Pay. The CMS decides the service type and it can keep a case on Collect and Pay indefinitely, including where the receiving parent has asked for it because of safety concerns or a history of unreliable payment.

What moves the decision:

• A clean payment record. A sustained run of payments made in full and on time through Collect and Pay directly answers the reason the case was put there. Nothing else is as persuasive.
• Both parents asking.A joint request is treated very differently from one parent asking over the other's objection.
• A concrete proposal. Standing order, fixed date each month, from a named account. Vague willingness is easy to refuse.

What does not move it: arguing that the 20% is unfair, or that you cannot afford it.

When paying the 20% is the better decision

Direct Pay is only cheaper if the money actually turns up. Collect and Pay is worth the surcharge when any of these apply.

• Payments have been late, short or missed before. Chasing them yourself costs time and usually fails.
• Contact between the parents is unsafe or is being used to control. Taking the money out of the conversation has a value that does not show up in the percentages.
• You need a formal record of what was paid and when. Collect and Pay produces one automatically. Direct Pay leaves both parents relying on their own bank statements, which matters when you are later working out a shortfall on the arrears calculator.
• Enforcement is likely to be needed. Deduction from Earnings Orders and Deduction Orders sit behind Collect and Pay, and what happens when maintenance is not paid sets out how far those powers reach.

On the £60 a week example, Collect and Pay costs the receiving parent about £2.40 a week. If that converts an unreliable arrangement into a reliable one, it pays for itself several times over in the first missed payment it prevents.

What the 20% does not buy

The surcharge is a collection charge. It is not a service level agreement, and expecting more from it than it provides is where a lot of frustration starts.

• It does not guarantee enforcement. Collect and Pay gives the CMS the route to take money from wages or a bank account, but the decision to use those powers, and the speed of it, is still discretionary. Cases sit in queues.
• It does not make the payment arrive on a fixed date. Money collected from the paying parent is processed before it is passed on, so the date it leaves one account and the date it lands in the other are not the same.
• It does not increase what the child receives. Every pound of the 20% goes to the service. The maintenance figure is unchanged.
• It does not protect the receiving parent from a shortfall. If half the maintenance is collected, roughly half comes through. The 4% is taken from money that actually passes through, so a month with no collection costs nothing in fees and delivers nothing either.

Your fees change at every annual review

Fees are a percentage, so they move whenever the assessment moves. Take the £500 a week, one child example. If gross weekly income rises to £560 at the annual review, the assessment goes from £60 to £67.20 a week. The paying parent's Collect and Pay bill goes from £72 to £80.64 a week, and the receiving parent goes from £57.60 to £64.51. The fee element alone moves from £12 to £13.44 a week for the paying parent, which is another £75 across the year on top of the extra maintenance.

Rerun the numbers each time a new calculation letter arrives, because the letter states the maintenance figure and the fees have to be worked out from it.

Expect a gap before any money moves

Fees start when the service does, and the service does not start quickly. An initial calculation commonly takes four to twelve weeks, and once a calculation exists there is usually another two to six weeks before Collect and Pay money reaches the receiving parent. That first payment then covers a period that has already passed, which is why the first statement rarely matches what either parent expected. How long Collect and Pay takes covers the stages in detail.

Delay beyond those ranges is a service issue, not a legal one, and complaining about it in writing works better than phoning. The complaint letter tool builds the request with the dates and case reference in place. If the internal process runs out, the Independent Case Examiner is next, then the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman through your MP.

One habit worth keeping either way: check the fee figures against your own bank statements every few months. Fees are calculated from the maintenance figure, so a rate change at annual review changes them too, and the change is easy to miss on a statement that only shows totals.

Common questions