Scottish Child Payment was initially introduced for low-income families with children aged under six.

The payment was extended to eligible low-income families with children aged under 16 on 14 November 2022.

It is intended to provide regular, additional financial support for families already in receipt of qualifying benefits to assist with the costs of caring for a child.

Social Security Scotland enabled clients to apply from 9 November 2020 in advance of the benefit being launched on 15 February 2021 to help manage the expected demand.

Applicants began to receive a decision from 15 February onwards, with the first payments made to clients from the end of February 2021.

When the benefit was extended to include children under 16, existing clients had the opportunity to request that additional children be added to their case without submitting a full application.

This publication includes statistics on applications and payments for Scottish Child Payment from 9 November 2020 to 31 March 2023 and also provides information on the number of children in receipt of Scottish Child Payment.

Applications received and processed reported on within this publication include full applications only.

By contrast, the management information releases published on 16 November 2022 and 20 December 2022 included both full applications and applications from existing clients requesting to add children over six to the existing Scottish Child Payment awards.

The Background section has further detail about the payment and its application process, including more information on the distinction between these two types of applications and the reasons why the statistics report only on full applications.

As part of the continuous improvement of our outputs, a new table (Table 7) has been added to reflect the number of individual clients paid by financial year.

If you have any comments or suggestions that you would like to provide us around these changes or other developments, please email MI@socialsecurity.gov.scot.

All tables and charts referred to within this publication can be found on the gov.scot website.

These statistics are being published as experimental statistics.

Experimental statistics are defined in the Code of Practice for Statistics as "new official statistics undergoing evaluation. They are published in order to involve users and stakeholders in their development and as a means to build in quality at an early stage."

The UK Statistics Authority has not yet assessed these statistics. They have not been designated as National Statistics.

You can find more information on experimental statistics on the UK Statistics Authority website.