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Disclaimer: Interest is estimated as simple interest over the average age of missed payments; enforcement agencies calculate payment-by-payment and rates change quarterly. Not legal advice.
Arrears are the accumulated shortfall between what a support order (or filed agreement) required and what was actually paid. The arithmetic is unforgiving: the ordered amount keeps accruing every month until a court varies it, no matter what the parents privately arranged and no matter what happened to the payor's income. Add postjudgment interest — Ontario's Courts of Justice Act rate, reset quarterly, applies to Ontario orders — and a few years of quiet non-payment becomes a five-figure judgment debt that survives bankruptcy (Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act s.178) and, in most provinces, never becomes statute-barred.
Every province runs a maintenance enforcement program — Ontario's Family Responsibility Office (FRO), Alberta's MEP, BC's FMEP, and counterparts elsewhere. Once an order is filed, the program collects automatically: support deduction orders to employers, federal interceptions of tax refunds and EI, bank account seizures, property liens, credit bureau reporting, driver's licence suspension, federal passport cancellation, and ultimately default hearings where persistent defaulters face up to 180 days in jail. Reciprocal enforcement legislation extends collection to every province, all US states, and many other countries.
An order requires $800/month. The payor pays nothing for 30 months except $3,000 in sporadic transfers. Principal arrears: 30 × $800 − $3,000 = $21,000. At 5% simple interest over the average 15-month age of the missed payments, interest adds about $1,313, for a total owing near $22,300 — collectible by wage garnishment at source once FRO or the local MEP engages.
Recipients should get advice on registering with enforcement and on whether to trade interest for a lump-sum catch-up. Payors whose income has genuinely fallen need to apply to vary immediately — under the DBS framework, courts rarely cancel arrears for a payor who could have applied earlier and simply stopped paying. Both sides benefit from counsel at a default hearing, where incarceration is on the table.
Explore more free tools on our Family Law Calculators hub, walk through our interactive Family Law Wizards to understand your situation step by step, or contact LexScale.ai to build calculators like this for your own law firm website.
Enter the monthly amount ordered, the number of months missed, the total of any partial payments actually made, and the applicable interest rate on the arrears. The tool computes the principal arrears (ordered amounts minus payments), applies simple interest over the average age of the missed payments, and totals what is owing. Enforcement agencies calculate interest payment-by-payment, so their statement will differ modestly from this average-period estimate — but the output is close enough to plan around.
Two practical truths dominate arrears cases. First, arrears almost never disappear: courts rarely cancel support debt retroactively unless the payor proves they genuinely could not pay when each payment fell due — losing a job and never applying to vary the order is not enough. Second, the sooner a struggling payor applies to change the order, the better: a variation generally reaches back only to the application date. A payor whose income has truly dropped should file immediately and keep paying something; a recipient owed arrears should register with the enforcement agency early, because agencies collect far more effectively than informal chasing.
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