Poor children

Russian authorities are tightening the rules for receiving child benefits year after year. At the beginning of 2026, for the first time, this led not only to a reduction in the number of recipients, but also to a decrease in the total amount of payments. All this is happening simultaneously with a large-scale government campaign to increase the birth rate. How the benefit system has changed and what the reforms of recent years have led to - in the material “Things like this”.

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Alina Kuznetsova , a mother of three from Moscow, could not receive child benefits for five years in a row. Her husband had difficulties with work, and she herself could not work full time due to the need to look after the children. To have something to feed her children, Alina took out loans. As it soon became clear, this became a problem when receiving benefits.

The Social Fund rejected her because Alina did not provide certificates from all the banks she applied to. “ While I was doing this, the validity period of the first statements expired,” explains the mother of three children.

As a result, it took Alina several years to finally prove to the state that her family needed social benefits. All this time she was paying off loans and closing bank accounts.

In 2025, when the youngest daughter turned three years old, the benefit was finally approved. By this time, Alina had already divorced her husband. “It’s extremely difficult to get any benefits,” she says. The woman adds:

“I experienced this myself and for several years I was under severe stress from despair and hopelessness.”

Ilya Yeletsky lives with his family in Novosibirsk. In 2026, he and his wife applied for a single child care benefit for the first time. My daughter went to first grade, and there was a noticeable shortage of money. “During this period, our financial situation began to meet the criteria for benefits. But they refused us,” says Ilya.

The Social Fund told the Eletskys that over the past year the family received too much interest on bank deposits - slightly more than the subsistence level (in 2025 in the Novosibirsk region this amount was about 17 thousand rubles). “Then I told my wife that we would not ask for any more benefits from the state, otherwise they would add some extra taxes instead of support,” concluded Ilya.

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In the first quarter of 2026, families with children received 310 billion rubles in monthly payments, according to the Social Fund of Russia. This is 2% less than for the same period in 2025, when this amount amounted to 316 billion rubles. This is the first time such a decline has occurred since 2022.

It follows from the statistics that monthly benefits for children from eight to 17 years old have completely disappeared - such payments have ceased to be provided. At the same time, payments to children of deceased military personnel and law enforcement officers of Russia increased 5.5 times. In the first three months of 2026, almost 39 million rubles were spent on them.

The basic amount of such a payment is a little more than 3.3 thousand rubles, but the exact number of recipients is impossible to calculate: the amount depends on the regional coefficient. For example, in Moscow there are no allowances, but for residents of Tuva the benefit amount is multiplied by 1.4 or 1.5 depending on the region.

There are also noticeably fewer recipients of regular monthly child benefits. According to the Russian Ministry of Labor, in 2025, 522 thousand people received such payments. Five years ago - more than 4 million people.

At the same time, for many families, benefits remain an important part of the budget: in the first quarter of 2026, social payments accounted for 16.2% of Russian household income. According to a Rosstat study for 2024, approximately a third of all social payments came from child benefits. As follows from official data, residents of the North Caucasus and Tuva depend most on these payments .

How Russia came to this

Since the late nineties, child benefits in Russia have been paid on a targeted basis - only to those whose incomes were below a certain level. For example, in 2002, a family could receive 70 rubles per child if the income per person was below the subsistence level.

Many countries have a different approach . In Germany , Poland or Israel, benefits are paid regardless of family income.

Until 2017, the Russian system was mainly regulated by regions and was heavily dependent on local authorities. The exception was 2012, when President Vladimir Putin, by his decree , “recommended” regions to assign monthly payments to large families.

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Full reform began in 2018. Then families with their first child and an income below one and a half subsistence levels began to receive a payment in the amount of one child subsistence minimum. For the second child, a similar payment could be issued from maternity capital funds. The benefit was paid until the child reached one and a half years old.

The rules have changed in 2020 . The threshold of need was raised to two subsistence minimums per person, and the payment period was increased to the child’s age of three.

At the same time, a new allowance appeared for children from three to seven years old - if the family income is below the subsistence level. After this, the number of recipients increased sharply . If in 2019 3.6 million people received benefits, then in 2020 - already more than 4 million. At the same time, the authorities did not check why the family turned out to be low-income - those who simply did not work also received payments.

Already in 2021, the state began to tighten conditions

The amount of benefits was differentiated - from 50 to 100% of the child’s subsistence level. At the same time, officials began checking the family’s property: how many apartments, cars and other property they had.

At the same time, the “zero income” rule appeared : a person had to explain why he was not working. Valid reasons included child care, full-time education, military service, registration at an employment center, or serving a sentence.

In the same year, the authorities introduced benefits for children from eight to 17 years old, and in 2022 the size of these payments was tied to family income. Thus, in 2021, the number of recipients of monthly benefits decreased from 4 to 3.6 million people, in 2022 - to 3 million.

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In 2023, all separate payments were combined into benefits for pregnant women and families with children. Women could receive it from the 12th week of pregnancy until the child reaches adulthood. But the criteria became even stricter: the state began to check the family’s property, the availability of transport and the reasons for the lack of income. After this reform, the number of recipients decreased from 3 million to 1.3 million.

“Working should be profitable, and state support should serve as a support, as an additional income to your salary, and not as a replacement,” Putin explained then.

Since then, the rules for receiving child benefits have continued to tighten. In 2025, the procedure for accounting for alimony changed. If previously parents could indicate the amount of payments themselves without a court decision, now the Social Fund calculates alimony based on the minimum wage in the region. The Ministry of Labor explained this by the fight against fictitious divorces, which are especially common in the North Caucasus.

Another tightening affected self-employed Russians. The authorities considered that self-employed status is often used to circumvent the “zero income” rule. Therefore, from 2025, a person had to officially earn as an employee or self-employed at least four minimum wages per year - about 90 thousand rubles. Otherwise, the benefit could not be assigned. In 2026, the bar was raised to eight minimum wages - this is approximately 216 thousand rubles per year.

“To now receive child benefits, you need to become a completely poor person, who has neither a stake nor a yard,” says Tatyana Stoskova, director of the Family Hearth Foundation.

The state began to check everything: the presence of bank accounts, an old house in the village from a great-great-grandmother, even if the family cannot support it, the expert continues. “You can sell this house,” the state seems to be saying. "Yes. And eat it in three months,” adds Stoskova.

According to her, large families who have been deprived of government payments are increasingly turning to the fund for help:

“Families with four to five or more children often come to us and have been denied benefits.”

“There are now significantly more low-income families with children—not on paper, but in fact—than in 2020–2021,” says Stoskova.

She notes that due to the reduction in government support, the burden on charities is also increasing. At the same time, after the start of the “special military operation” in Ukraine, it became more difficult for many NGOs to find funding and help so many people.

Strict selection

Due to the large number of denials of payments to families with children, in May 2026 the Social Fund began reviewing its decisions. But exceptions will be made only for families with many children and only if their income exceeds the established limits by no more than 10%.

In addition to tightening the rules for receiving benefits, the state has become stricter with those who try to circumvent the rules. “Such cases” analyzed more than 18 thousand court decisions made since the beginning of 2021 for fraud in receiving social benefits, of which 1.2 thousand cases concerned support measures for families with children, including maternity capital.

Thus, only 43 people were convicted directly for fraud in receiving child benefits, but 35 of them were convicted in 2024–2026. That is, over the past two years the number of sentences has increased several times.

From the court decisions that “Such Cases” studied, it follows that those who hid information about income or fictitiously registered in the regions of the Far North, where the regional coefficient, and therefore the amount of benefits, are higher, were found guilty mainly.

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There are specific punishments in only 16 of all the sentences studied. Of these, 10 people received suspended sentences - on average about two years. The real sentence - three years - was given to one mother with many children from Dagestan, who was illegally paid almost 600 thousand rubles in the form of benefits. Another woman, whom the court found guilty, was sent to correctional labor for a year. The remaining defendants received fines, the average amount being 185 thousand rubles.

Fertility versus poverty

The decline in benefit coverage comes amid a massive campaign to increase the birth rate. In Russia, access to abortion is being made more difficult and “childfree propaganda” is prohibited , but the total fertility rate has been falling since 2014. In 2025, it actually returned to the level of the mid-nineties.

Demographer Alexey Raksha believes that most existing benefits have almost no influence on families’ decisions about having a child. “Apparently, this is influenced only by large payments without using the criteria of need and targeting, without restrictions on age and income, starting from the second child. Mostly one-time ones,” says Raksha.

At the same time, the wide coverage of benefits in 2020–2021 still had a short-term effect in the regions of the North Caucasus, demographer Andrei Ivanov counters:

“This effect was not sustainable, and the birth rate there soon began to decline, as in other regions.”

“Local residents on average have higher reproductive rates, and thanks to benefits, someone was able to give birth to the next child they wanted. In regions where the number of desired children is lower, this effect of benefits will be much less,” explains Ivanov.

At the same time, the expert considers the main task of benefits not to increase the birth rate, but to fight poverty. Thus, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova has repeatedly called reducing poverty among large families one of the key tasks of demographic policy.

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According to Rosstat, the poverty level of large families from 2020 to 2025 decreased from 38.1 to 16.2%. But tightening the rules for receiving benefits also had the opposite effect. The share of children living below the poverty line increased from 3.5 to 4.4% in 2023 . It was then that the authorities introduced a single benefit with new strict criteria.

“For any family that applies for benefits, this money is certainly important; the financial situation of such families is often very difficult,” says Natalya Shilina, a lawyer at the “Mnogomama” fund for helping large families.

If a family does not agree with the refusal to pay benefits, it should find out the reasons, and then, if desired, contact the prosecutor’s office, says Shilina: “In my practice, there was such a case quite recently. The woman was repeatedly denied benefits for various reasons, but an appeal to the prosecutor’s office immediately solved all the problems.”

According to the lawyer, there is a practice when the prosecutor's office goes to court to protect the rights of the family. Another option to achieve the due payment is to file a lawsuit yourself. There are chances to win such a case.