Child Support Calculator

How we calculate this estimate

We apply the guideline model your state actually uses, and the models differ more than most summaries suggest. Most states follow the Income Shares Model: both parents' monthly incomes are combined, a basic support obligation is drawn from that combined figure and the number of children, and each parent covers the share that matches their portion of the combined income. Which income figure gets combined is the state's own to define and it is not the same one everywhere, so this page names it for your state where the guideline has been read and does not guess at it where it has not. Percentage of Income states apply a set rate to the paying parent's income alone, and Nevada's tiered version steps that rate down across income brackets. The Melson Formula reserves a self-support amount for each parent before dividing what is left. Some states do neither: North Dakota reads a dollar figure off a table keyed to one parent's net income, and California publishes a single algebraic formula with no schedule behind it. Which one your state is on is named on its own page rather than inferred from a list here. Credits for health insurance and childcare are applied where the state's own guideline builds them into the order, along with any income cap the state sets, and the list of what moves the number on each state's page names the levers that actually move that state's figure. Parenting time is computed in the states whose own guideline we have read and implemented, and in no others.

What the estimate assumes

• Income figures are gross monthly, before taxes, counting the sources your state includes.
• Parenting time moves the figure only where we have read and implemented the state's own rule. The parenting-time section further down this page says which case this state is in, and where no adjustment applies the estimate is the amount before one. We previously reduced support past 146 overnights on a coefficient of our own. 146 turned out to be a single state's statutory threshold applied to all fifty, the size of the reduction had no legal source anywhere, and the mechanisms states actually use are not variations on one rule. Among the ones we have now read: a worksheet that switches at a threshold both parents must clear, an offset applied continuously with no trigger, a threshold that does nothing below it and slides above it, a term written into the guideline formula itself so there is no unadjusted amount at all, no parenting-time term anywhere, and a formula prescribed by statute whose text we do not have. That list is what we have read rather than what exists, and it has grown with every state checked. We removed ours rather than defaulting it, and we publish each state's adjustment as that state's own rule is verified.
• North Carolina is one of the verified threshold cases, at 123 overnights under the guidelines adopted pursuant to N.C. Gen. Stat. 50-13.4(c1). The threshold has to be cleared by both parents, which is why a parent well past an even split can fall outside shared care entirely.
• Texas has no parenting-time adjustment at all, because its guideline has none. Tex. Fam. Code 154.125 runs on the obligor's net resources and the number of children, and the state's own calculator has no field for overnights. Possession time enters only as a discretionary deviation factor, Tex. Fam. Code 154.123(b)(4).
• Georgia has a mandatory parenting-time adjustment whose formula we do not have. O.C.G.A. 19-6-15(g), effective January 1 2026, requires the court to adjust the noncustodial parent's basic obligation wherever there is a court-ordered parenting time schedule, with the result entered on Child Support Schedule C. Applying arithmetic of our own in place of a prescribed formula would be worse than applying none, so the Georgia estimate is the presumptive amount before that adjustment.
• Where a state's own schedule has been transcribed, the basic obligation is read straight off it. Where it has not, the figure comes from a national approximation of the tables courts read from, and the source panel on that state's page says which of the two you are looking at. That approximation has been measured against the seven transcribed schedules keyed to the same thing it is, at 546 income and family-size combinations. It missed them by 32 to 86 percent on average, and it missed them in both directions at once: at every income from $1,500 to $6,000 of combined monthly income it came in under at least one of those schedules and over another, then above all seven from $8,000 up, reaching 69 to 240 percent above those states' own tables at $30,000. So a modeled figure at a high combined income is the least reliable number this calculator returns, and near $6,000 is where the approximation lands closest.
• Where a state sets an income ceiling, we clamp income at it. That is a fair model of a real cap and a poor one of everything else, so two states are handled differently. New York's $193,000 of combined parental income is the point above which a court may consider the additional income, not a limit on what it can order, and our figure there is the amount the guideline produces at the threshold. New Jersey's Appendix IX-F schedule ends at $3,600 of combined weekly net income, and courts are instructed in capital letters not to extrapolate past it, so we read the obligation at the schedule's last row and treat the result as the minimum basic support award rather than as a guideline amount. Appendix IX-A requires a New Jersey court to add to that minimum from the income above the ceiling. Modeling what a court adds is not something we can do honestly, because it turns on statutory factors rather than on arithmetic. Above the New Jersey line our figure is therefore a floor, and above the New York line it is not one: the addition New Jersey requires is what makes its schedule figure a minimum, and no New York instrument says an award may not come in below the amount at the threshold. Both figures read as the low end of a realistic range and only one of them is a floor a reader can count on.
• The same schedule can also stop short at the bottom. New Jersey publishes no award figure below $180 of combined weekly net income, where the court sets the amount from the paying parent's income and living expenses within a published range. Our estimate at that income is a modeled figure with nothing from the state to check it against, and it says so.
• The result is a guideline number. Judges can deviate from it when the facts justify a different amount.

Where the estimate stops

Your state's official worksheet is the controlling document, and a court order can land somewhere other than any guideline estimate. Use this to prepare, then confirm the figure with a licensed family law attorney or your state's child support agency.

Read the full methodology for how every calculator on the site is built.

Sources

Where to read more

Background reading, not where the figures above came from. No number on this page is taken from any of these.

• National Conference of State Legislatures, child support guideline models by state
• Office of Child Support Services, U.S. Administration for Children and Families
• American Bar Association, Section of Family Law

About this page

Written by Barron Hansen

I am an app developer who is dedicated to building the highest-value, most accurate web apps possible, that people want to use every day.