Pillar Guide · Updated July 2026
UK Spousal Maintenance: A Practical Guide for 2026/27
Spousal maintenance is often the most contested and least predictable element of a UK divorce settlement, because — unlike child maintenance — there is no statutory formula. This pillar guide explains how courts in England and Wales decide whether to order maintenance at all, how the amount and duration are assessed under the section 25 factors, the difference between joint lives and term orders, why the courts increasingly favour a clean break, how maintenance can be varied or capitalised, and how it interacts with child maintenance, tax and enforcement.
What Spousal Maintenance Is
Spousal maintenance (sometimes called periodical payments) is a regular, usually monthly, payment from one former spouse or civil partner to the other after divorce or dissolution, intended to meet the recipient's reasonable income needs where their own income and resources fall short. It is distinct from child maintenance, which is assessed separately and covers a child's needs, and from the division of capital such as the family home, savings, and pensions, which is dealt with through a separate financial order.
Maintenance is not automatic. Many divorces — particularly shorter marriages between two working-age people with similar earning capacity — end with no maintenance order at all, or with a “nominal” order of a token amount (often 5p a year) that keeps the court's power alive without requiring real payments, as a safety net in case circumstances change unexpectedly.
Where genuine need exists — most commonly after a long marriage with a significant gap in earning capacity, often linked to one party having taken a primary caring role — the court has wide discretion to order maintenance, and this discretion is one of the least predictable areas of English family law, in contrast to the formula-driven approach used for child maintenance.
How Courts Decide: The Section 25 Factors
Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 sets out the factors a court must weigh when deciding financial remedy applications, including maintenance:
- Income, earning capacity, property and other financial resources each party has or is likely to have
- Financial needs, obligations and responsibilities each party has or is likely to have
- The standard of living enjoyed by the family before the marriage broke down
- The age of each party and the duration of the marriage
- Any physical or mental disability of either party
- Contributions each party has made or is likely to make to the welfare of the family
- The conduct of each party, if it would be inequitable to disregard it (rarely applied)
- The value of any benefit either party will lose the chance of acquiring, such as a pension
The court's overriding objective, since White v White (2000) and Miller/McFarlane (2006), is fairness — assessed through the lenses of needs, sharing and compensation. For most maintenance decisions, “needs” dominates: what income does the recipient reasonably require to meet their outgoings, generously assessed by reference to the marital standard of living, and to what extent can that be met from their own earning capacity, capital, and any pension income already awarded through sharing?
Joint Lives vs Term Orders
A joint lives ordercontinues indefinitely until either party dies, the recipient remarries, or the order is varied or discharged by further court order. Historically common after long marriages, joint lives orders have become less favoured following Court of Appeal guidance — notably Waggott v Waggott (2018) — which emphasised that maintenance should reflect needs, not an open-ended share of the payer's future earnings, and that recipients should generally be expected to become self-sufficient where realistically possible.
A term orderruns for a fixed number of years — commonly set to expire when the youngest child finishes secondary education, when the recipient reaches state pension age, or after a period considered sufficient for the recipient to retrain or re-enter the workforce. A term order can be made “extendable” (the recipient can apply to extend it before expiry) or, more restrictively, subject to a section 28(1A) bar preventing any extension — a stronger form of clean break that gives the payer certainty the obligation will end on the stated date regardless of circumstances.
Courts increasingly favour term orders with a section 28(1A) bar where the evidence supports the recipient becoming self-sufficient, reserving joint lives orders for long marriages (typically 20+ years), older recipients with limited remaining earning years, recipients with health conditions limiting employability, or cases where the income disparity is too large and too entrenched to close within a foreseeable term.
Clean Break and Capitalisation
Section 25A of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 requires the court to consider, in every case, whether it would be appropriate to end the parties' financial obligations to each other as soon as is just and reasonable — a “clean break”. Where the court makes a maintenance order rather than achieving a clean break, it must explain why. This statutory nudge has driven a long-term trend toward capitalising future maintenance into a lump sum wherever there is sufficient capital or pension to do so.
Capitalisation is commonly calculated using a Duxbury calculation — an actuarial model (named after the 1990 case Duxbury v Duxbury) that estimates the lump sum needed, if invested and drawn down over the recipient's remaining life expectancy, to replicate a target income without exhausting the fund prematurely. Duxbury calculations are sensitive to assumed investment returns, inflation, and life expectancy, and are usually produced by a forensic accountant using specialist software (the “Duxbury tables” published annually).
A clean break is not always achievable, particularly where the payer has income but limited capital (a common profile for a mid-career professional without significant savings) — in which case ongoing periodical payments remain the only realistic route, at least until the payer accumulates capital or retires with a pension that can then be shared or capitalised.
Variation, Remarriage and Cohabitation
Unlike a capital order, a periodical payments order remains variable throughout its life under section 31 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. Either party can apply to the court to increase, decrease, suspend or discharge the order where circumstances have changed materially — for example the payer losing their job or retiring, the payer receiving a significant pay rise, the recipient increasing their earning capacity, or either party's health changing.
Remarriage of the recipient automatically terminates spousal maintenance by operation of law under section 28(1), with no further court order required, although any arrears accrued before the remarriage remain payable and recoverable. Cohabitation with a new partner does not automatically end maintenance, but is a factor the payer can rely on in a variation application, particularly where the new relationship provides genuine financial interdependence that reduces the recipient's needs.
A payer can also apply at any point to capitalise the remaining maintenance obligation into a lump sum, achieving a clean break even where the original order was joint lives — often attractive where the payer has since accumulated capital (for example through inheritance or a business sale) and wants certainty rather than an open-ended monthly commitment vulnerable to future variation applications.
Interaction with Child Maintenance
Spousal maintenance and child maintenance are assessed through entirely different processes. Child maintenance is normally handled by the Child Maintenance Service using a statutory formula based on the paying parent's gross weekly income, the number of qualifying children, and the number of shared care nights — the court has only limited jurisdiction to order child maintenance directly (chiefly for top-up orders above the CMS income cap, school fees, or disability-related costs).
Spousal maintenance, by contrast, is decided entirely by the family court applying the section 25 factors, with no formula. Where a recipient parent is also caring for children full-time, courts often blend a “child element” into the household budget used to justify spousal maintenance — colloquially a “global maintenance” approach — even though the CMS assessment is calculated separately. As children grow up and require less full-time care, the recipient's expected earning capacity typically increases, which is one of the main triggers for reducing or ending a term maintenance order.
A paying parent who has both spousal and child maintenance obligations pays both in parallel; the court considering spousal maintenance takes account of the payer's overall affordability across both commitments, but cannot reduce the CMS assessment directly — any dispute about the CMS calculation itself must go through CMS variation or appeal channels.
Tax Treatment
Since April 2000, spousal maintenance payments in the UK are not taxable income in the hands of the recipient and are not tax-deductible for the payer. This is a simplification compared with the pre-2000 regime, which allowed limited tax relief for maintenance payments to a former spouse. The current rule applies to maintenance paid under a court order or a written and enforceable agreement.
Because maintenance is paid from the payer's post-tax, post-National-Insurance income, and received tax-free by the recipient, the effective cost to the payer is higher than the headline monthly figure once their own marginal tax rate (20%, 40% or 45% under the 2026/27 income tax bands) is factored in — a point often raised in negotiations when comparing the after-tax cost of maintenance to alternative capital settlements.
Enforcement of Unpaid Maintenance
If a payer stops making ordered maintenance payments, the recipient has several enforcement routes through the family court: an attachment of earnings order, deducting arrears and ongoing payments directly from the payer's salary through their employer; a third-party debt order, freezing and redirecting funds from the payer's bank account; a charging order against property owned by the payer, which can ultimately lead to a forced sale; and, for wilful and deliberate non-payment, a judgment summons — a quasi-criminal process that can result in committal to prison for up to six weeks, used only in the most serious and deliberate cases of non-compliance.
Enforcement proceedings add cost, delay and uncertainty for both sides, which is a key reason courts and family lawyers increasingly steer settlements toward capitalised clean breaks — turning an ongoing, enforceable-but-fragile obligation into a one-off payment that removes future financial ties and the enforcement risk entirely.