Child Benefit



Child Benefit is a tax-free payment that is aimed at helping parents cope with the cost of bringing up children. One parent can claim £20.70 a week for an eldest or only child and £13.70 a week for each of their other children. The payments apply to all children aged under 16 and, in some cases, until they are 20-years-old.
The current rates are frozen due to the four-year freeze on benefits imposed by the government from April 2016. 


Until January 2013, the benefit was available to every family with children. But since then the benefit has been steadily withdrawn from families where one parent earns more than £50,000. In detail, the benefit received is recouped gradually as the income of the highest earning parent rises above £50,000, with the Child Benefit being eroded completely once their income is £60,000 or more. The changes to the rules reduced the entitlement of around 1.2 million families. 



Any Child Benefit paid to high-earners who do not opt-out is clawed back through the so-called High Income Child Benefit Charge, administered by HM Revenue and Customs. If somebody earning more than £50,000 or their partner keeps claiming Child Benefit, then the higher earner must declare this in a self-assessment tax form. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that 500,000 extra people may now have to fill in these forms as a result of the change introduced on 7 January 2013.



The 2015 TUC report, Eroding Child Benefit, showed that by the 2020 general election a family with two children is likely to be more than £9 a week (£470 a year) worse off. A couple with two children were already almost £6 a week worse off as a result of the changes brought in under the Tory-led coalition government, as Child Benefit has been frozen, capped and taken away from better off families.



In total, a family with two children lost out on £1,084 between 2011-12 and 2015-16. The TUC calculated that the cumulative impact of the government’s planned changes would be £2,018 for a family with two children between 2016-17 to 2020-21 based on the 2015 Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) projections for the consumer price index (CPI) and the retail price index (RPI), a total loss of a massive £3,102.