Child Maintenance Service Fees Raised £235 Million — Yet Taxpayers Still Paid at Least £367 Million
The Child Maintenance Service charges substantial fees when parents use its Collect and Pay service.
Paying parents are charged an additional 20% on top of their child maintenance liability, while receiving parents lose 4% of the maintenance collected for their children.
These charges are supposed to contribute towards the cost of running the service. But how much do they actually cover—and how much does the taxpayer still pay?
Official Department for Work and Pensions figures reveal that, between 2019/20 and 2023/24:
Core CMS operations cost approximately £602 million.
Collect and Pay fees generated approximately £235.4 million.
After deducting those fees, the estimated cost to taxpayers was still approximately £366.6 million.
In other words, Collect and Pay fees covered only around 39% of the CMS’s core operating expenditure during these five years. Taxpayers effectively covered the remaining 61%.
CMS costs and fees by year
All figures are in millions.
| Financial year | Core CMS operating cost | Paying-parent fees | Receiving-parent fees | Total Collect and Pay fees | Estimated taxpayer cost after fees |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019/20 | £146.2m | £34.8m | £6.8m | £41.6m | £104.6m |
| 2020/21 | £115.1m | £34.2m | £6.7m | £40.9m | £74.2m |
| 2021/22 | £120.7m | £38.5m | £7.5m | £46.0m | £74.7m |
| 2022/23 | £104.1m | £41.3m | £8.0m | £49.3m | £54.8m |
| 2023/24 | £115.9m | £48.2m | £9.4m | £57.6m | £58.3m |
| Total | £602.0m | £197.0m | £38.4m | £235.4m | £366.6m |
The underlying figures were supplied by DWP in a parliamentary answer published on 9 June 2025.
The estimated taxpayer cost has been calculated by subtracting the reported Collect and Pay fee income from the reported core operating expenditure.
Parents paid almost £200 million in 20% charges
The largest source of fee income was the additional 20% charged to paying parents.
Across the five years, paying parents contributed approximately:
£197 million
Receiving parents lost a further:
£38.4 million
This produced combined Collect and Pay fee income of:
£235.4 million
This money was collected in addition to the child maintenance intended to support children.
For every £100 of maintenance collected through Collect and Pay:
The paying parent can be required to pay £120.
The receiving parent receives only £96.
The government can therefore collect up to £24 in combined fees.
The fee is charged only when money is successfully collected.
Are CMS fees covering more of its costs?
The proportion of core operating costs covered by fees has increased considerably.
| Financial year | Percentage of core costs covered by fees |
|---|---|
| 2019/20 | 28.5% |
| 2020/21 | 35.5% |
| 2021/22 | 38.1% |
| 2022/23 | 47.4% |
| 2023/24 | 49.7% |
By 2023/24, fees were equivalent to almost half of the narrowly defined core operating costs.
However, that does not mean parents funded half of the CMS’s total economic cost.
The true taxpayer cost is probably higher
The DWP figures exclude several important categories of expenditure, including:
Digital services and technology
Buildings and estates
Other central DWP overheads
Some modernisation and transformation expenditure
The estimated £366.6 million taxpayer contribution is therefore a conservative figure.
It represents the remaining cost after fees have been deducted from core CMS operational spending. It does not represent every public cost associated with maintaining, developing and supporting the service.
The National Audit Office previously reported that the net cost of running the wider Child Maintenance Group was £322 million in 2020/21. That broader figure included activity and costs falling outside the narrower operational definition used in the parliamentary answer.
The National Audit Office’s 2022 Child Maintenance report also found that DWP had not achieved the reduction in administrative costs originally anticipated.
What happened in 2024/25?
The CMS Client Funds Account records £70.8 million in non-child-maintenance receipts during 2024/25, compared with £60.6 million in the preceding year.
However, this figure is broader than the Collect and Pay fees shown in the main table. It principally includes collection and enforcement charges but can also contain other non-maintenance receipts.
DWP has not published a directly comparable core operating-cost figure for 2024/25 alongside it. It would therefore be misleading to add the £70.8 million to the five-year total without further information.
The figure is available in the 2012 Child Maintenance Scheme Client Funds Account for 2024/25.
Why can’t we go further back?
The Child Maintenance Service began in December 2012, replacing the Child Support Agency. Collect and Pay fees were introduced in 2014.
In theory, this means a financial comparison should be possible from 2014/15 onwards.
The problem is that DWP did not maintain a clean separation between the operating costs of the new CMS and those of the remaining CSA schemes during the transition.
The National Audit Office reported that DWP was unable to separate the costs of the Child Support Agency schemes from those of the Child Maintenance Service.
Historical figures describing the cost of the statutory child-maintenance system therefore include a mixture of:
CMS cases
Remaining CSA cases
Closing the old schemes
Managing historic CSA arrears
Transition and reform expenditure
Using those figures as though they related solely to CMS would create a misleading comparison.
A Freedom of Information request is now needed for equivalent CMS-only figures covering 2014/15 to 2018/19, together with the complete figures for 2024/25.
Did Collect and Pay fees achieve their purpose?
The government introduced the charges for three principal reasons:
To contribute towards the cost of the service.
To encourage parents to make private family-based arrangements.
To encourage paying parents to pay voluntarily through Direct Pay.
The figures show that the fees have made a substantial financial contribution. They generated more than £235 million over five years and covered a growing share of narrowly defined operating expenditure.
But this raises an important policy question.
Many families use Collect and Pay because payments have already failed or because direct financial contact between the parents may be unsafe or inappropriate. Receiving parents can therefore lose 4% of money intended for their children because the other parent has not paid reliably.
At the same time, the additional 20% charge can make an already difficult debt substantially harder for the paying parent to clear.
Despite imposing these charges on both parents, the service still required an estimated taxpayer subsidy of at least £366.6 million over five years—and that calculation excludes major central, digital and property costs.
The bottom line
Between 2019/20 and 2023/24, parents paid approximately £235.4 million in Collect and Pay fees.
Nevertheless, after those fees were taken into account, taxpayers still contributed an estimated £366.6 million towards core CMS operations.
The full public cost was almost certainly higher because the published operational figures exclude digital, estates and central DWP expenditure.
The essential figures are:
Core CMS operating expenditure: £602 million
Collect and Pay fees: £235.4 million
Estimated taxpayer cost after fees: £366.6 million
Core costs recovered through fees: 39%
Core costs left to taxpayers: 61%
The government is entitled to argue that the fees offset some of the cost of providing Collect and Pay. But it should publish a complete annual account showing exactly what the CMS costs, how much parents contribute through every type of fee and how much taxpayers ultimately pay.
Without that transparency, neither Parliament nor parents can properly judge whether the Child Maintenance Service is delivering value for money.