If you receive payments of benefit, it is your duty to report any changes in your circumstances that may affect your entitlement. This includes changes in yours and your household's circumstances. You can ring our offices to report a change. You will be asked to confirm the details in writing and provide proof of the change.

You can now tell us of any changes in your circumstances by completing one of our electronic forms online and sending it into the offices.

You should notify our service as soon as possible, in most cases this should be within four weeks of the change. It is important that you advise us of changes in your circumstances quickly as benefit is assessed on a weekly basis, so failure to report a change can lead to the wrong amount of benefit being paid and could mean that you would have to pay some money back.

The change in your circumstances could increase the amount of benefit that you receive. If you tell us within four weeks of the change, we will award the additional benefit from the monday following the date of the change. You can use our benefit calculator to see what the change will make to your benefit. If you notify us of a change in your circumstances after four weeks of the date of change, we may only award the additional benefit from the Monday following the date that you notify us.

Sometimes you will receive notification after the change has happened. We will be able to take this into consideration if you provide proof of the change within four weeks of when you are notified.

In most cases, if we have paid you too much benefit we will seek to recover the amount. When we decide to recover an amount overpaid to you we will send you a notification letter explaining the amount of overpaid benefit, the period that the overpaid benefit relates to and the reasons for our decision.

We will usually send you an invoice for the amount of overpaid benefit. If you continue to receive benefit we will make an ongoing deduction from Housing Benefit payments until the debt is clear. When we decide to reduce your payments we will take into consideration your financial circumstances. There are limits to what we can take to protect you. If you would like to know the standard recovery amount that we can take from your weekly entitlement, please contact us.

You have the right to appeal against our decision to recover overpaid benefit and the amount that we recover from your new entitlement, see appeals for more information.

You will have 28 days from the date of the invoice to repay the amount. If you do not think you can pay within 28 days, you should contact our service immediately to make an arrangement, see contact us. If we do not receive a payment from you and we have not accepted an arrangement to pay the money back, you would receive a court notice. For information about Housing Benefit overpayments, repayments and court proceedings, please contact the debt recovery section.