Child Maintenance Calculator

This Child Maintenance Calculator can be used by parents in England & Wales as a tool to help them in discussions about the level of child support to be agreed after separation.  It does not matter whether the parents are married, divorced, civil partners or co-habitants.

The Child Maintenance Calculator is based on the rules introduced by the Child Maintenance Service on 29th July 2013.  It uses a gross income model and applies different rates (or a combination of rates) in 5 bands:

Why have I built my own child maintenance calculator?

Good question.  The UK government has provided its own calculator.  That’s great, but it has the following major drawbacks:

• It is not fully transparent.  It only provides a basic summary.  As a family law specialist, I know that there can be a high level of mistrust between parents after separation over their financial means.  My Child Maintenance Calculator displays more of the inputs in the calculation, such as the level of gross income entered or the level of pension contributions so both parents can be assured of reasonable accuracy.  And if not, it can be quickly corrected.
• There is no easy way to save or communicate the result of the government calculator to the other parent.  My Child Maintenance Calculator automatically converts the results into a clear PDF format which can be emailed directly to your inbox so you have a record of the result.  Even better, you can ask the calculator to email the calculation to your co-parent, lawyer or mediator.  Just let the person know they should be getting an email: some can get caught up by junk email filters. 
• The UK government’s child maintenance calculator has not been optimised for use on mobile devices (smart phones and tablets).  Nearly 50% of my blog readers access my site through mobile devices.  Naturally, I have made sure my calculator and the resulting calculation (captured in a PDF) are optimised for mobile use.

The small print…

I hope you find my calculator helpful.  I do not accept any liability for the use of the calculator which must be used at your own risk.  My calculator utilises the formulas published by the Child Maintenance Service on 29th July 2013.  The government calculator rounds up or down to the nearest £ whereas my calculator returns a precise calculation (to the penny).  My calculator will return results using a gross weekly income in excess of £3,000 a week whereas the Child Maintenance Service cannot take into account any income over the £3,000 weekly threshold.  However, I have allowed the calculator to deal with income in excess of this threshold to aid discussions between parents and possibly avoid an expensive application to the family court for a ‘top-up’ order on the balance of income over £3,000 a week.

Remember that the calculator is intended to be a tool to aid discussions over child maintenance.  It allows parents to predict what level of child maintenance may be requested if the Child Maintenance Service is involved.  Parents may therefore use this information to sensibly adopt their own private arrangement tailored to their particular circumstances. AND AVOID BEING CHARGED FOR USING THE CHILD MAINTENANCE SERVICE IN THE FUTURE.

The child support maintenance calculator is currently undergoing maintenance and will be restored shortly.