Why Am I Only Getting £100 a Month?

You were put on the standard rate — the £100 a month version of Bereavement Support Payment — because of one fact, and only one: at the date your partner died, you were not pregnant, and you were not entitled to Child Benefit for a child living with you. The £350 a month rate is the rate for a bereaved parent. The £100 a month rate is the rate for everyone else who qualifies. It is not a judgement about how badly you are struggling, and it is not the DWP looking at your income and deciding you need less. It is decided by whether there were dependent children in the picture, and nothing else.

That is a hard thing to read when you are the one left holding the bills, because the lower rate really is lower. The standard rate pays a smaller one-off lump sum and then £100 a month for up to 18 months. The higher rate pays a larger lump sum and £350 a month across the same 18 months. Same length of support, very different money — and the single lever that moves you from one to the other is a dependent child.

So if you are a widow or widower whose children left home years ago, or a married couple who never had children, the standard rate is the whole of the Bereavement Support Payment answer for you. This page explains why the line is drawn exactly there, what the standard rate actually adds up to over its 18 months, and the narrow set of circumstances in which a lower-rate award can be put right.

The short answer: the rate is decided by children, not by need

Bereavement Support Payment has two rates, and the whole of the difference between them comes down to one question the DWP asks about the date of death: were you a parent of a dependent child, or expecting one? If the answer is yes, you get the higher rate. If it is no, you get the standard rate. There is no sliding scale in between, no assessment of your rent, your savings or your earnings, and no way to argue your way onto the higher rate because your outgoings are high.

This catches people out because every other means-tested part of the benefits system does look at need. Universal Credit tapers against your income; Pension Credit tops up to a floor; council tax support flexes with your circumstances. Bereavement Support Payment does none of that. It is a contribution-based payment triggered by your late partner's National Insurance record, and the only thing that changes the amount is the presence of a child. Once you understand that, the £100 stops looking like a mistake and starts looking like exactly what the rules produce.

It is worth saying plainly, because it is the source of a lot of quiet distress: being on the lower rate does not mean the DWP has decided your loss matters less. The design simply assumes that a household with children to raise has a larger and longer bill to meet, and routes the extra money there. Whether that assumption is fair to a fifty-eight-year-old widow paying a mortgage alone is a separate argument, but it is not one the rate itself is open to.

What the standard rate actually pays

Here is the standard rate in full, so you can see the whole of it. It is a one-off lump sum of £2,500, paid shortly after a successful claim, followed by up to 18 monthly payments of £100. Added together, that is up to £4,300 spread across a year and a half, and then it stops.

The higher rate, for comparison, is a £3,500 lump sum and £350 a month over the same 18 months. The gap between the two rates is therefore substantial — a little over five thousand pounds across the life of the award — and all of it hangs on that one question about children.

Source: Department for Work and Pensions, Bereavement Support Payment, gov.uk, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Two features of the standard rate matter more than the headline number. The first is that it is fixed: the £100 has not risen since Bereavement Support Payment began in April 2017, and it is not uprated each April the way most benefits are. So the payment buys a little less with every year that passes. The second is that it is time-limited to 18 months regardless of your circumstances, with no successor benefit waiting at the end and no taper down. For most people on the standard rate, the honest planning assumption is that the state's direct help with the death runs out well inside two years.

The monthly payments are tax free and are ignored as income for means-tested benefits, so they will not reduce a Universal Credit or Pension Credit award. The lump sum is treated differently — it is disregarded as capital for a period and then counts towards the savings limits — which is worth understanding separately if you claim other help. It also does not touch your rent support directly, though the interaction is worth reading up on: we set out whether Bereavement Support Payment changes your housing costs in its own guide.

Why grown-up children do not count

The most common way people expect to reach the higher rate is through their children, and the most common disappointment is discovering that adult children do not qualify them. The test is not whether you are a parent. It is whether, on the date your partner died, you were entitled to Child Benefit for a child who was living with you.

Child Benefit entitlement normally runs while a child is under 16, or under 20 and in approved education or training. Once your youngest passes out of that bracket, the entitlement ends, and with it goes the route to the higher rate — even if that child is still at home, still financially dependent on you in every ordinary sense, and still very much your responsibility. A twenty-two-year-old living in the box room does not bring the £350 rate into play, because there is no Child Benefit attached to them.

There is one subtlety worth knowing, because it trips up higher earners in particular. What matters is entitlement to Child Benefit, not whether the money was actually being paid. Some parents opt out of receiving Child Benefit to avoid the High Income Child Benefit Charge but remain entitled to it. If that describes you and there was a qualifying child at the date of death, you may be on the wrong rate — a point we deal with in opting out of Child Benefit and the bereavement claim. That is a genuine, correctable error, unlike simply having grown children.

Pregnancy: the other route to the higher rate

The higher rate is not only about children who already exist. If you were pregnant when your partner died, you qualify for the higher rate on that basis alone, whether or not you have any other children and regardless of how the pregnancy later turns out. This exists precisely because a survivor expecting a baby faces the same larger, longer-running costs the higher rate is meant to meet, even though there is no Child Benefit entitlement yet.

If you were pregnant at the date of death and were nonetheless awarded the standard rate, that is the sort of factual error the rules will look at again, provided you raise it. It is not a change of mind by the DWP that you need — it is a correction of the facts as they stood on the day. Keep any dating evidence from your maternity notes, because that is what settles the question.

Can the rate be changed after the award?

Sometimes, but only in one direction and only for one reason. You cannot be moved up to the higher rate because your circumstances have since got harder, because a child was born after the death, or because you now realise how little £100 a month covers. A change of circumstances after the date of death does not shift the rate.

What can be corrected is a mistake about the facts as they were on the day your partner died. If you were pregnant and it was not recorded, or you were entitled to Child Benefit for a qualifying child and the award ignored it, that is an error in the decision rather than a change in your life. The route to fix it is a mandatory reconsideration: ask the DWP in writing to look at the decision again, ideally within one month of the decision letter, set out the fact that was missed, and attach the evidence — a maternity record, a Child Benefit award notice, proof of who the child lived with. If the reconsideration is refused and you still believe the facts support the higher rate, you can appeal to an independent tribunal.

Move quickly if this is you. The one-month window for a mandatory reconsideration is short, and while late requests can be accepted with a good reason, you should not rely on that. If you are unsure whether your situation is a correctable error or simply the rules working as intended, free help from Citizens Advice or MoneyHelper costs nothing and neither will try to sell you anything.

What the standard rate does not stretch to

The reason the lower rate hits so hard is that it was never designed to replace an income. Up to £4,300 over eighteen months is help with the shock of the first year and a half, not a substitute for the wage or pension that has gone. For a household that was running on two incomes and is now running on one, or on none, the gap between what Bereavement Support Payment pays and what the bills actually cost is the whole of the problem.

That gap is worst for exactly the people the standard rate is for. A younger widow with grown children may still have a mortgage, a car loan and years of working life to fund alone. Someone who was themselves the financial support for others — an elderly parent, say — leaves a hole that the state does not fill; we look at that specific situation in what happens to a parent you support financially if you die. And an unmarried partner with no children is in a harder place still, because for them the answer is not a lower rate but nothing at all: a cohabiting couple with no children cannot claim Bereavement Support Payment in the first place.

This is the point at which the honest thing to say is that the state's part is small and finite, and the rest is what a household arranges for itself. Where a family can put life cover in place while both partners are alive and well, it is the one thing that meets the loss of an income at the moment it happens rather than eighteen months of a fixed £100. If you are reading this after the fact and want to protect whoever is left after you, you can get life insurance quotes and have an FCA-authorised broker price a level term policy against your actual mortgage and outgoings.

Scotland and Northern Ireland

The two rates, the £100 and the £350, and the children test that decides between them, are the same across the whole of the United Kingdom. What differs is who administers the claim. In Great Britain it is the Department for Work and Pensions. In Northern Ireland social security is run separately by the Department for Communities under its own legislation, though the rates and rules mirror Great Britain almost exactly — we cover the practical differences in how Northern Ireland runs its own bereavement payment.

Some survivors find that the age rules matter more to them than the rate rules. If you had already reached State Pension age when your partner died, Bereavement Support Payment is closed to you at either rate, and the relevant checks are inherited pension and Pension Credit instead — set out in what to claim when you are over State Pension age. And if you were married but long separated, the rate question may be less pressing than whether you can claim at all, which turns on your legal status rather than your living arrangements; we cover that in claiming when you were separated but never divorced. For the wider picture, our full guide to bereavement benefits and state support maps how these payments fit together.

Frequently asked questions

What decides which rate I get?

The higher rate goes to a claimant who was pregnant when their partner died, or who was entitled to Child Benefit for a child living with them at that date. Everyone else who qualifies receives the standard rate: a smaller lump sum and up to 18 monthly payments of £100. Your income, savings and outgoings make no difference to which rate applies.

My children are grown up, so does that count?

Not unless you were still entitled to Child Benefit for them when your partner died, which normally means a child under 16, or under 20 and in approved education or training. Adult children living at home, however dependent on you they are in practice, do not bring the higher rate into play, because there is no Child Benefit entitlement attached to them.

Can the rate be changed after the award?

Only if the facts at the date of death were recorded wrongly — for example you were pregnant, or Child Benefit entitlement existed but was not being paid out. Ask for a mandatory reconsideration within a month of the decision letter and send the evidence. A change of circumstances after the death, including a child born later, cannot move you up to the higher rate.