Child Benefit Explained: Rates, the High Income Charge, and Why You Should Still Claim It

Some higher-earning families don’t bother claiming Child Benefit at all, assuming they’ll simply have to pay it all back. This is one of the most costly financial mistakes new parents make - claiming protects far more than just the payment itself.

The current rates

From 6 April 2026, Child Benefit pays £27.05 a week for your eldest or only child, and £17.90 a week for each additional child - paid every four weeks, tax-free, with no limit on how many children you can claim for and no savings or income test on the basic entitlement itself.

The High Income Child Benefit Charge (HICBC)

If you or your partner has an adjusted net income over £60,000, the higher earner has to repay some or all of the Child Benefit through the tax system:

• £60,000-£80,000: repay 1% of the Child Benefit for every £200 of income above £60,000.
• £80,000 and above: repay the full amount received.

Despite earlier proposals to move the charge onto a household-income basis (which would have affected dual-earner couples differently), the Treasury has confirmed this reform will not proceed - the charge remains based on the individual income of the highest earner, meaning a single higher-earning parent triggers the charge even if their partner earns nothing, while two parents each earning just under £60,000 (a combined £120,000) aren’t affected at all.

Why you should claim even if you’ll repay all of it

• National Insurance credits. The parent claiming Child Benefit for a child under 12 receives automatic Class 3 NI credits if they’re not working or earning below the NI threshold - these credits protect your State Pension entitlement (see our Pensions series article on the annual allowance and qualifying years), and missing even one year can cost thousands of pounds in lifetime State Pension income.
• Your child’s National Insurance number. Registering for Child Benefit ensures your child is automatically issued their NI number shortly before their 16th birthday - useful groundwork for when they eventually start their first job and need to make sense of tax and payslips - a detail many parents don’t realise is connected to the claim.
• You can opt out of receiving the money while still claiming. If you know you’ll repay the full amount via the HICBC, you can register the claim but tick the option not to actually receive payments - avoiding the administrative step of paying it back later, while still protecting the NI credits and your child’s NI number registration.

How the charge is actually collected

If you owe the HICBC, it’s collected either through Self Assessment or, since a recent process change, directly through your PAYE tax code if you don’t otherwise need to file a Self Assessment return - worth checking which applies to you, since using the PAYE route can avoid the need to register for Self Assessment purely for this charge.

How pension contributions can reduce or eliminate the charge

Because the HICBC is based on adjusted net income, increasing pension contributions (personal or via salary sacrifice, see our ISA & SIPP series for the mechanics) reduces your adjusted net income and can bring you back under the £60,000 threshold entirely - a genuinely valuable double benefit, since you get standard pension tax relief on the contribution and potentially avoid the HICBC as well.

Retrospective NI credits if you didn’t claim in the past

From April 2026, HMRC opened a route allowing parents who didn’t claim Child Benefit going back to 2013 - because they assumed there was no point, or weren’t aware of the NI credit - to apply retrospectively for the NI credits they missed, protecting their State Pension entitlement for those years. Worth checking if this applies to you, even if the original claiming window has long since passed.

The bottom line

Register for Child Benefit regardless of your income - the National Insurance credits and your child’s automatic NI number registration are valuable protections that have nothing to do with whether you actually keep the payment itself. If your income means you’ll repay some or all of it via the HICBC, you can simply opt out of receiving the money while keeping every other benefit of the claim.