Don’t forget to extend your teen’s child benefits

Hundreds of thousands of teenagers are thinking about their next steps after finding out their GCSE results on 22 August.

If your 16–19-year-old is staying in approved education or training, you’ve got until 31 August to extend your claim for child benefit.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is urging parents to extend claims now as child benefit usually stops when your child turns 16.

What’s approved education?

In order to qualify for extended child benefit, your 16-19-year-old needs to be in full-time education, including:

• A-levels or similar, like Pre-U or International Baccalaureate
• T-levels
• Scottish Highers
• NVQ or vocational qualifications up to level 3 (excluding intermediate and advanced apprenticeships)
• home education if it started before your child turned 16, or after 16 if they have special educational needs or disabilities
• traineeships in England

How to extend your claim

HMRC will have sent you a letter asking what your child’s plans are. The quickest way to extend your claim is online or in the HMRC app.

The person in your household claiming child benefit has to be the one to update HMRC.

Make sure you keep your claim details up to date, even if you’ve opted out of child benefit payments because of the high-income benefit charge (which you have to pay if you or your partner have an individual income that’s over £60,000).

If you want to opt back into receiving payments, you can do this online or through the app too.

You can get up to £1,331 a year for your first child, plus up to £881 a year for every additional child.