Can your council take Child Benefit off your special guardianship allowance?

Written and reviewed by Patricia Hughes · Last updated 3 September 2026 · last reviewed 3 September 2026 · rates for 2026/27

If your allowance seems low, this is one of the first things worth checking. It is also the one I found hardest to get a straight answer on in my own case.

Start with what is allowed

The regulations require a council to take into account any other grant, benefit, allowance or resource available to you. They do not name Child Benefit, but Child Benefit is plainly one of them, so it is something your council has to consider.

The deduction itself comes from the case law rather than from that wording. In Barrett v Kirklees the court said councils should pay at a rate in line with the fostering allowance, "with the deduction of Child Benefit if appropriate".

So the deduction is permitted. If you ask your council whether it is allowed to do this, the answer is yes, and the conversation stops there. That is why this page starts here rather than with the complaint.

It is worth being precise about this, because a council that is quoted the wrong rule will correct you, and you will have spent your first letter losing a point you did not need to make.

What some councils do

A number of councils treat Child Benefit as income when they work out a special guardianship allowance, and take it off pound for pound. So a carer who would otherwise get the full amount receives that much less each week.

Where the real question lies

In 2024 the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman looked at a council that deducted Child Benefit from every carer on Universal Credit as a matter of blanket policy, without looking at individual circumstances. The Ombudsman found that at fault.

The council had to recalculate the allowances of around 170 carers, pay refunds, and make remedy payments to the carers who complained. It changed its policy, and a later complaint about the new practice was not upheld.

The point was never that Child Benefit can be ignored. It was that applying one rule to everybody, without thinking about the individual case, is not the same thing as assessing someone's circumstances, which is what the regulations require. In another decision the Ombudsman put the test as whether the council had justification for the deduction.

So the question worth asking is not may you do this. It is how did you decide it in my case, and what were your reasons.

What my calculator does

I never deduct Child Benefit unless you explicitly tell me your council does. Even then, I show you the figure with and without it, and I flag the deduction rather than burying it in the arithmetic. That is a deliberate choice: a tool that quietly reduces your figure the way a contested policy does is not helping you.

What to ask your council

Keep it short and ask for answers in writing:

1. Do you take Child Benefit into account when calculating my allowance, and if so how much?
2. Does your policy treat carers on means-tested benefits differently?
3. How was that decided in my case?

Asking for the written policy at the same time saves a round of correspondence.

If you get nowhere

Use your council's complaints procedure first. The Ombudsman will normally expect you to have done that before it looks at anything, and if you are still not satisfied afterwards, you can ask it to.

What you can check, and what you have to ask for

Everything about what is allowed is already public, and all of it is above: the regulations, the case law, and the Ombudsman decision.

None of that tells you what happened in your case. Whether your council looked at your circumstances or applied one rule to everybody is the entire question, and only your council knows the answer. Ask for its reasons in writing.