Child Maintenance Options

Child Maintenance Options is a free service that provides impartial information and support to help separated parents make decisions about their child maintenance arrangements. 

Child maintenance is about providing help with a child's everyday living costs. This includes things like food and clothes, and helping to provide a home for your child or children. 

Child maintenance is usually money that the parent without the main day-to-day care of a child pays to the other parent. However, sharing the care of your children and buying things directly for them can also be included in a family-based child maintenance arrangement, if both parents agree to it.

It's essential that both parents work together to agree what's right for them and their children. 

Because we are impartial we are here to help either parent or anyone else with an interest in child maintenance and we aren't biased towards any one way of arranging child maintenance. 

We're here to help you: 

• if you're separating from the other parent or are not living with them and you need to set up a child maintenance arrangement
• if you have responsibility for a child who doesn't live with their parents, for example if you are a grandparent or other relative
• if you're thinking of switching from a statutory child maintenance arrangement to a family-based arrangement, or the other way round
• if your child maintenance arrangement has broken down or is not working as you'd like it to.