Database: Households on Universal Credit
Description
Family type defines whether the household comprises a single person or a couple, with or without children.
A couple is 2 adults in the same household who are married, in a civil partnership, or living together as if they were married.
The rate of the standard allowance in Universal Credit is used to determine single and couple family types. Couple family types are cases where entitlement to a standard allowance is higher than the maximum entitlement for a single person.
Before April 2019, families with children are determined by whether the household is awarded a child entitlement.
From (and including) April 2019, families with children are determined by a child or young person under 20 that has been verified as living in the household.
Classification
Applicable to: All Households
The Family Type field can take the following values:
Total number of categories: 5
Quality Statement
As family type is determined by the standard allowance awarded, a small number of couples may be recorded as a single person with or without children because they are awarded a single person's standard allowance as their partner is ineligible for Universal Credit.
A revised methodology for family type was first used in August 2021 for all months in the data from April 2019 to align it with new data on children in Universal Credit households. Comparisons before and after April 2019 cannot be made. The revised methodology was not applied to months before April 2019 because Universal Credit was administered on both a legacy system and the current administrative system before April 2019. The methodology can only be applied to the current administrative system. Comparisons between the old and new methodologies have been published in Universal Credit statistics: background information and methodology.
Under the new methodology there are a small number of households with unknown or missing family type. These are typically where a child element has been awarded but, in the data available to statisticians, there is no child data available for the reporting month.
It is currently not possible within the data available to statisticians to reliably identify if a declared child is a dependant or a child of the claimant.
Where a child shares their time between two households, they are counted in the main carer's household.
During rollout of Universal Credit, the eligibility criteria for new claims from different family types varied for different regions. As such, figures from before December 2018 (when rollout was complete) should be carefully considered before any inferences are drawn around geographical differences in family types.