You are paid Child Benefit if you are responsible for looking after a child under the age of 16, or if they are under the age of 20 and still in approved education or training
Child Benefit payments are set to rise from April 2026 – here is how much more you will get.
You are paid Child Benefit if you are responsible for looking after a child under the age of 16, or if they are under the age of 20 and still in approved education or training.
In order to qualify for Child Benefit, the child normally has to live with you, or you pay at least the same amount as Child Benefit toward looking after them.
Child Benefit is currently worth £26.05 a week for your first child, then £17.25 a week for any additional child. This will rise by 3.8% from April 2026, in line with the previous September rate of inflation.
This means Child Benefit rates will increase to £27.50 a week for your first child, and £17.90 a week for any additional child. These rates have been noted provisionally on GOV.UK. Child Benefit is paid every four weeks by HMRC.
There is no limit for how many children you can claim Child Benefit for, but if two people look after a child, only one person can claim Child Benefit.
If you, or your partner, earn over £60,000, then you have to pay part of your Child Benefit back. This is known as the High Income Child Benefit Charge.
If either of you earn over £60,000, you pay back 1% of your Child Benefit for every £200 you earn over £60,000. Once you earn over £80,000, you pay back 100% of your Child Benefit back.
You can pay the high income charge through self-assessment or through your PAYE tax code. Child Benefit is claimed by more than seven million families.
It comes after thousands of families who were wrongly denied Child Benefit by HMRC following a bungled fraud crackdown have now had their payments returned.
Nearly 17,100 claimants have had their money put back after the tax office acknowledged major problems with a new checking system that suspended payments for over 23,700 people.
Child Benefit is normally stopped if you go on holiday for more than eight weeks. As part of a new pilot scheme to tackle fraud, HMRC used travel data to decide whether someone had left the country permanently.
However, some people were incorrectly identified as not having returned from trips abroad.
An HMRC spokesperson said: “We’re very sorry to those whose payments have been suspended incorrectly. We have taken immediate action to update the process, giving customers one month to respond before payments are suspended.
“We remain committed to protecting taxpayers’ money and are confident that the majority of suspensions are accurate.”
