United Kingdom Child Benefit Claim (Form CH2)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-03

draft, not verified, because the online/HMRC-app claim channel was not walked through (it requires a Government Gateway sign-in) — see "What was not done" below. This schema is sourced directly from HMRC's own downloadable, current-edition CH2 form.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): gb/hmrc/child-benefit-claim-ch2 / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).
• https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/child-benefit-claim-form-ch2 — reachable directly (HTTP 200, no bot-block encountered), linking to three PDFs on assets.publishing.service.gov.uk:
  • CH2_online_form.pdf — the claim form itself, edition HMRC 04/26 (i.e. April 2026 — the current edition at the time of this review, not a retired or third-party-mirrored one). Retrieved via curl (HTTP 200, 413,586 bytes) and text-extracted with a scratch npm install of pdfjs-dist (legacy build) — a plain, non-encrypted 9-page PDF whose standard text-layer extraction recovered the full form: Section 1 (About you, Q1–13), the residency/immigration branch (Q14–20), Q21–22, marital status (Q23), Section 2 (About your partner, Q24–33), Section 3 (Children you want to claim for, Q34–61, covering up to 2 children on the base form), Section 4 (Higher income earners, Q62), Section 5 (How you want to be paid, Q63–65), Section 6 (Bank details, Q66–71), the Declaration, and the CH3 address label page. This is this document's primary field-level source — every field name, label, enum option, and sourceRef is drawn from this PDF's text.
  • CH2_Notes.pdf — the companion "Child Benefit: Getting your claim right" notes, retrieved and decoded the same way (HTTP 200, 352,666 bytes). Cross-checked for the "Additional children" continuation-page reference (page 7) cited in this document's scope boundary, and for the birth-certificate/passport/adoption-certificate document requirements cited in documents[].
  • CH2_CS.pdf (a continuation/supplementary sheet, referenced by the publication page but not separately fetched this cycle — see "What was not done").
• https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit/how-to-claim and https://www.gov.uk/child-benefit-tax-charge-adjacent prose (fetched as part of the CH2 form's own page 1 introduction) confirm the online/ HMRC-app channel exists as a faster alternative and that the High Income Child Benefit Charge (Q62's gating context) is a live, current HMRC policy, not something specific to the retrieved edition.

What was not done — the one honest gap

No live walkthrough of the online/HMRC-app "Claim Child Benefit" channel was performed — GOV.UK's own guidance states it requires signing in (creating Government Gateway credentials if the applicant doesn't have them) and may require identity verification via photo ID, none of which is publicly field-documented outside an authenticated session. The paper CH2 form is described by HMRC itself as collecting the same underlying claim information regardless of channel ("It's quick and easy to claim online... If you cannot claim online, fill in this form"), so this document treats the paper form as the faithful, fully field-documented source — the same choice made for au/ato/tax-file-number-application and in/eci/voter-registration when an online channel's field set isn't independently published.

CH2_CS.pdf (a continuation/supplementary sheet linked from the same publication page) was not fetched or examined this cycle; a future review should check whether it duplicates or supplements the "Additional children" continuation content already scoped out of this version.

Test run performed

Phase 4 of this cycle's research brief calls for a test run with valid mock data. A scratch Node script (/tmp/ch2-test/mocktest.mjs, not checked into the registry) implements the GSP-0013 condition grammar (equals/notEquals/in/all/any/not) and resolves visibleWhen/requiredWhen against two independent mock claimants:

1. A single parent with no partner, one child born in England (registered birth, English/Welsh system number branch), a first-time claim, opting into weekly payment as a single parent, paid into her own account.
2. A married couple (exercising the "About your partner" section, gated by the inferred hasPartnerSection boolean), claiming for 2 children — one born and registered in England, one born abroad and adopted (exercising child2BirthRegisteredInGreatBritain's false branch and the child2AdoptionCertificate document's requiredWhen) — who are a higher-income household opting out of Child Benefit payments to protect State Pension only (isHigherIncomeHousehold: true, wantsToBePaidChildBenefit: false, which correctly skips the bank details section per alreadyGetsChildBenefit's requiredWhen).

Both scenarios: (a) supply every field that is required given its resolved visibility, (b) pass each field's own validation (pattern/enum/min-max), and (c) contain no reference to a field name absent from fields[] across every visibleWhen, requiredWhen, documents[] requiredWhen, and steps[].fields entry. Both passed on the first run; no schema defect was found by this test.

The schema also validates against both the zero-dependency structural checker (tools/validate.mjs) and the full JSON Schema draft 2020-12 meta-schema via ajv (tools/validate-ajv.mjs).

Modelling decisions

• Models the base CH2 form's inline capacity of up to 2 children. The source form itself prints "Child 1" and "Child 2" blocks (Q36–48 and Q49–61) and directs claimants with more children to a separate "Additional children" continuation page (CH2 Notes, page 7) — out of scope for this version (see "Out of scope"). numberOfChildrenClaimed is capped at 2 (maximum: 2) to reflect this.
• **child2* fields use visibleWhen/requiredWhen gated on numberOfChildrenClaimed == 2.** Matches this registry's convention for a repeating block whose cardinality is itself a collected field (cf. us/dos/immigrant-visa-ds260's multi-applicant pattern), rather than an array/object type GovSchema v0.3 doesn't natively support for repeating field groups.
• hasPartnerSection is an inferred gating boolean, not a printed form field, following this registry's convention (au/aec/voter-enrolment, in/eci/voter-registration) for adding an explicit boolean where GovSchema's visibleWhen/requiredWhen grammar needs one but the source form only implies it through its own section structure ("2 About your partner" only applies given a maritalStatus of married_or_civil_partnership or living_with_partner).
• employmentStatus/partnerEmploymentStatus modelled as single-value enums, not multi-select. The source form explicitly allows ticking more than one employment-status box ("Tick the box or boxes that apply"), but GovSchema's enum validation keyword accepts one value; documented in each field's own description as a simplification rather than modelled as an array-of-enum (which the spec's nonFileValidation keyword set does not support for a string/enum type).
• **Birth-registration branch (child*BirthRegisteredCountry) doubles as the trigger for the birth-certificate/passport/travel-document attachments**, since the source form's own logic is "if birth NOT registered in England, Wales, or Scotland, send the documents" — modelled as requiredWhen: { field: "childNBirthRegisteredInGreatBritain", equals: false } on the relevant documents[] entries, which is a faithful restatement of the form's own printed instruction rather than an independent inference.
• Adoption-certificate requirement gated on relationship == adopted_child, a broader condition than the source's narrower "if your child was adopted abroad" — GovSchema has no field distinguishing domestic from international adoption in this document, so the condition is deliberately over-inclusive (may flag the document as required for a domestic adoption where it is not strictly needed) rather than silently under-inclusive; documented here rather than modelled as a further undocumented field.
• Bank sort code and account number given fixed UK-format patterns (^[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}$ and ^[0-9]{8}$ respectively) since the source form prints boxed digit groups for both, consistent with standard UK bank account/sort code formats and this registry's comb-field convention.
• National Insurance number pattern (^[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{6}[A-Z]$) reused from this registry's existing UK NI-number-adjacent conventions (two letters, six digits, one letter — the standard NI number format).
• CH3 address label (page 9 of the source PDF) not modelled. It is a postal-logistics label for returning original documents to the applicant, not applicant-supplied claim data.
• Office-use-only markings (page 8's "For official use only" boxes: Corres/Traced/CLI, document-return tracking) not modelled — completed by HMRC staff processing the claim, not by the applicant.

Out of scope

• The online/HMRC-app claim channel — requires a Government Gateway sign-in and does not publish a field-by-field form outside an authenticated session; see "What was not done" above.
• The "Additional children" continuation page (CH2 Notes, page 7) — used when claiming for a 3rd or subsequent child; a distinct repeating-block form not modelled here.
• CH2_CS.pdf (a continuation/supplementary sheet linked from the same publication page) — not examined this cycle.
• Reporting a change of circumstances to an existing Child Benefit claim, and cancelling or objecting to a Child Benefit decision — both distinct HMRC processes with their own forms/channels, not the first-claim process this document models.
• Married Couple's Allowance — a separate HMRC allowance for couples where one partner was born before 6 April 1935, referenced in passing by the source material but not itself a Child Benefit process.

Re-verification

Per the practice's cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-03 (6 months). Re-fetch the CH2 form and Notes to check for an edition update (the HMRC 04/26 edition implies an annual refresh cycle), and attempt a live walkthrough of the online/HMRC-app claim channel if credentials become available; if the field set matches, promote status to verified.