Maternity capital is a serious measure of state support for families who decide to give birth to a second or subsequent child. In addition, this payment is subject to annual indexation, that is, to increase in accordance with the inflation rate.
Maternity capital is a certain amount of money transferred to the disposal of a complete or incomplete family that has given birth or adopted a second or subsequent child. This understanding of maternity capital is established by a normative legal act that serves as the legislative basis for the implementation of state support for such families - Federal Law No. 256-FZ of December 29, 2006 "On additional measures of state support for families with children."
Indexation of maternity capital
The first payments of maternity capital were made in 2007: then its value was 250 thousand rubles. However, paragraph 2 of Article 6 of the Federal Law "On Additional Measures of State Support for Families with Children" establishes that its size is subject to annual indexation, that is, revision, taking into account the rate of inflation in the country. The amount of maternity capital for each subsequent year is subject to fixation in the law on the federal budget for the corresponding period.
Thus, in the period from 2007 to the present, the amount of maternity capital was subjected to planned indexation seven times. At the same time, the annual indexation value ranged from 5 to 13%, in accordance with the inflation rate in the country. As of 2014, the legislatively approved amount of this payment is already 429408.5 rubles: this figure is established by Federal Law No. 349-FZ of December 2, 2013 "On the federal budget for 2014 and for the planning period of 2015 and 2016".
Restrictions on the use of maternity capital
At the same time, however, it is worth remembering that maternity capital funds cannot be received in the form of cash. The law on maternity capital provides for three main ways of managing these funds: increasing the mother's future pension in its funded part, educating children and improving housing conditions. In addition, the money can be distributed among several items at the discretion of the family. Moreover, in all three cases, the transfer of maternity capital funds to the recipient is carried out by non-cash method.
In addition, one should not forget that the aforementioned regulatory legal act provides that the specified measure of state support has a limited period of validity. So, the date for the exercise of such a right established for today ends on December 31, 2016. Thus, only those families in which the second or subsequent child was born or was adopted before this date will be able to receive maternity capital.
