If you keep up with your child support payments, they won’t affect your credit score. They’ll only impact your ability to borrow through a prospective lender’s affordability checks – i.e. where it looks at your income ang outgoings to gauge what monthly repayment would be affordable for you.
If you fall behind on your child support payments a “liability order” could be issued by the courts. The government introduced this measure in 2015 to deter parents from falling too far behind on their payments to the Child Maintenance Service.
The government pledged to share with credit reference agencies the child maintenance records of any parents who fall so deep into arrears that a liability order is issued.
If this happens to you, the liability order will appear on your credit file and could remain there for up to 7 years.
If you have been given a liability order, it will appear on your credit file and this will harm your credit score and therefore your ability to be approved for a loan or other financial products.
To some extent, you can offset the black mark that a liability order creates through sensible borrowing and you may find that some loans are still available to you.
However, your credit score and ability to access the best financial products will be much healthier if you avoid these liability orders.
If you’re able to keep up with your child support payments or only fall into slight arrears, this will have no impact on your credit score or your ability to get a loan.
David had been avoiding sending child maintenance payments for a significant amount of time and ignoring all communications from the Child Maintenance Service.
The Child Maintenance Service had no choice but to issue a liability order to the courts in order to reclaim these debts. This affected David's credit file and made it harder for him to access loans.
* This is a fictional, but realistic, example.
Even though some parents in the UK struggle to pay child maintenance, it’s not common for them to receive a liability order due to falling too far behind. But having such an order on your credit record can seriously harm your financial situation.
| Response | 55+ | 45-54 | 35-44 | 25-34 | 16-24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Very important | 42.11% | 41.52% | 44.92% | 52.17% | 40.78% |
| Quite important | 39.06% | 43.27% | 38.14% | 34.16% | 34.95% |
| Not that important | 9.42% | 8.77% | 12.29% | 7.45% | 15.53% |
| Not important at all | 5.54% | 3.51% | 2.12% | 2.48% | 2.91% |
| I don't know what a credit score is | 3.88% | 2.92% | 2.54% | 3.73% | 5.83% |
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