Story and alimony

If you separate, you may have to pay alimony or receive alimony. Alimony is paid by one ex-partner to the other ex-partner.

We have two types of alimony:

• Alimony for the children
• Alimony for the ex-partner

You pay or receive child support until the (youngest) child turns 21. Child support can also be paid directly to the child when the child turns 18. How long you pay or receive partner alimony depends on how long your marriage lasted.

Are you entitled to alimony and does your ex-partner not pay it? Then contact it LBIO. They can try to collect the alimony you were entitled to from your ex-partner. They can go back up to 6 months. For this they need a number of documents from you. If you receive a benefit yourself, you may have to sign a consent form for this. With the help of this form, the LBIO can transfer the alimony directly to the municipality and it does not have to be reduced (afterwards) from your benefit.

When applying for a benefit, we ask who your ex-partner and/or the father/mother of your children is. We can then investigate whether we can recover part of the benefit from your ex-partner. This means that we will see if we can recover part of the benefit that we pay to you from your ex-partner. He or she will receive a letter from us. We ask you to fill in a form. This form contains questions about his or her personal situation. We also ask for information about someone's income. Sometimes more data is needed.

An employee of Work and Income will review the information and assess whether your ex-partner has enough money to pay. We call this carrying capacity. We call the amount that he or she has to pay the maintenance contribution. We calculate this contribution in the same way as alimony. The difference is that your ex-partner does not pay the maintenance contribution to you, but to the municipality. This amount can never be higher than the payment. If your benefit stops because you go to work or for another reason, the maintenance contribution will also stop.