Georgia Child Support Calculator

How Georgia calculates child support

Our record puts Georgia on the Income Shares Model, though nobody here has read Georgia's own guideline to check it, which means both parents' incomes are combined, and each parent covers the share of the total obligation that matches their share of that combined income. Here is what that looks like in practice.

The Income Shares Model starts from an estimate of what the children would have received had the household stayed intact, then splits that figure between the parents. The calculation runs in three steps. Both parents' monthly incomes are added together. A basic support obligation for that combined figure and that number of children is set by the state's own guideline. Each parent is then responsible for the percentage of the obligation that matches their percentage of the combined income.

Because the obligation is divided by income share rather than assigned to one side, the receiving parent's earnings matter as much as the paying parent's. A parent bringing in 70 percent of the combined income carries roughly 70 percent of the total obligation. The parent the children live with most is treated as already spending their share through daily care, so only the other parent's share is ordered as a payment. That is why closing the income gap between two parents lowers the payment even when neither parent's own income falls.

Four things are then layered on top of the base figure: health insurance premiums covering the children, work-related childcare, support already being paid under an earlier order for other children, and, in most states, the number of overnights each parent has.

What moves a Georgia order

• Both parents' monthly incomes, and the gap between them
• Number of children covered by the order
• Court-ordered parenting time, through an adjustment the state requires by statute
• Health insurance premiums covering the children
• Work-related childcare paid for the children
• Support already ordered for children from another relationship

Income limits and judicial discretion

We hold no income ceiling for Georgia. What Georgia's own guideline does at the top of its schedule is a question this site has not answered for this state. Courts hold authority to depart from a guideline figure when it produces an amount that does not match what the children actually need. Georgia gives judges wide latitude on custody and parenting time, and where parenting time feeds the support calculation that discretion reaches the support number too. Expect more variation between courtrooms here than in states that work from a fixed schedule. That is our own record rather than Georgia's own custody law.

No child support estimate for Georgia

We have withdrawn our Georgia child support estimate rather than serve a figure our own measurements say is unreliable.

We are not showing you a child support figure for Georgia, and this is what sits behind that. Until now this page ran on a curve of our own: one national formula standing in for the schedule each income shares state publishes. Georgia's own schedule was not in it, because nobody here has read Georgia's guideline, and no reading of it has been recorded here since 2026-09-20.

Here is what we found when we measured that curve, and one thing about it first. This is our own arithmetic being checked against other states' published tables, not a finding about Georgia. Nobody has measured our curve against Georgia, and nobody can, until Georgia's own schedule has been read.

Checked against the eight state schedules we have transcribed, at 624 combinations of income and family size, our curve missed those schedules by 32 to 86 percent on average.

It is not wrong in one direction, which is the part that decided this. At every income from $1,500 to $6,000 a month it came in under at least one of those schedules and over another at the same time, by as much as 47 percent low and 258 percent high at a single income.

From $8,000 a month up it sat above all of them and stayed there, reaching 69 to 240 percent above those states' own tables at $30,000. Its worst region is where the dollars are largest.

A single correction would not rescue it. Because it runs low against some states and high against others at the same income, there is no factor we could multiply it by, and no direction we could honestly warn you about either. That is the line: an approximation we can point in one direction is something we can hand you with a caveat, and this one we cannot.

Knowing a figure is that far out is reason enough to stop showing it. It is not reason enough to show you a replacement nobody here has read, so we are doing the first and not the second.

If you need a Georgia figure now, we have not yet identified the document that carries it by name, so we are not going to point you at one and hope. A Georgia family law attorney or the state's own child support agency works from the guideline itself and can run your figures against it. Nobody here has read Georgia's own guideline, and no reading of it has been recorded here since 2026-09-20. We will publish Georgia here once that changes, to the same standard as every other state on this site.

How parenting time changes support in Georgia

Georgia does adjust support for parenting time, and the adjustment is required rather than left to a judge's discretion. O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15(g), whose parenting-time provisions took effect January 1, 2026, directs the court to apply a set formula to the noncustodial parent's basic obligation wherever there is a court-ordered parenting time schedule. The result is entered on Child Support Schedule C, the parenting time adjustment schedule, which is attached to the state child support worksheet. It is a step inside the presumptive calculation, not a deviation argued for after the guideline figure is settled.

The formula is printed in SB 454 (2024), the act that made the adjustment mandatory, at O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15(g)(2)(B), and the signed act Georgia's Governor publishes was read here on October 5, 2026. It is not transcribed or applied here, because that copy is a redline whose marks for deleted words do not survive extraction, so which of its words are current text is not settled yet. Running our own coefficient in its place would quietly swap our arithmetic for the legislature's, which is a worse error than applying nothing. That is one of the reasons this page puts you on Child Support Schedule C rather than on a number of ours: the adjustment is a stage of the Georgia calculation, not a discount argued for at the end of it, and a schedule you have agreed to changes what a court enters.

One practical consequence follows, and it is about your order rather than about this page. Where a case has no court-ordered parenting time schedule, the adjustment does not apply and support is worked out without it. Where a schedule does exist, the adjusted number comes off Child Support Schedule C. The worksheet is available through the Georgia courts and the state child support agency, both linked below, and any Georgia family law attorney can run it for your figures.

Where Georgia starts on parenting time

Georgia does not presume equal parenting time. That is our own record rather than Georgia's own custody law. Courts set the schedule on the best interests of the children, and once a schedule is ordered it feeds the support calculation directly through the statutory parenting time adjustment. So the overnight count is worth negotiating deliberately.

Getting a child support order in Georgia

The guideline figure is only half the picture. When the order actually arrives, and what it costs to argue about it, vary quite a bit from state to state, and both shape what a family lives on in the meantime.

Residency required, in our record

6 months

Waiting period, in our record

30 days

Uncontested, our estimate

3 months

Contested, our estimate

one year

Support before the case is finished

Our record has 6 months of residency in Georgia before you can file, and a waiting period of 30 days that has to run before a judge can finalize the divorce. States measure that period from different starting points, some from filing, some from service on your spouse, and some from the date the two of you separated, so confirm where Georgia's clock begins. On our own estimates, a contested case in Georgia runs one year, against 3 months when the parents agree. That gap is why temporary support matters. A judge can enter a temporary order early in the case, calculated on the same guideline, so the children are covered while the rest of the case is worked out. If money is tight now, a temporary order is usually the fastest relief available, and waiting for the final judgment can mean months without support.

What it costs to contest the number

On our own figures, family law attorneys in Georgia run $200 to $400 an hour, and mediation costs roughly $225 a session. Worth doing the arithmetic before digging in: a handful of billable hours on each side can cost more than a full year of the amount being argued over. Where the disagreement is genuinely large, or where one parent's income is hard to pin down, representation earns its keep. Where the gap between the two positions is a few dozen dollars a month, mediation or a negotiated agreement almost always leaves both households better off. Our record carries collaborative divorce as available in all fifty states, so it says nothing specific about Georgia; whether trained collaborative attorneys practise near you is a local question. Where it is on offer, both parents commit in writing to settle without litigation and use shared financial experts rather than competing ones.

Changing or enforcing a Georgia order

Modifying an existing order

A child support order is not permanent, but it also does not adjust on its own. Either parent can ask the court to recalculate, and the general standard across states is a substantial and continuing change in circumstances since the last order. Job loss, a significant raise, a change in the parenting schedule, a new child support obligation for another child, and a change in the children's medical or childcare costs are the changes that most often qualify.

Two points catch parents out. The first is that a modification usually takes effect from the date the request is filed, not the date the circumstances changed, so waiting to file means absorbing the gap. The second is that the obligation continues in full until a judge signs a new order. An informal agreement between parents to pay less does not bind the court, and arrears can still accrue against the paying parent for the difference.

Enforcement

Enforcement runs through Georgia's child support agency as well as the courts. Federal law requires every state to run a child support enforcement program with a common set of tools, which is why the remedies look broadly similar from state to state: income withholding straight from wages, interception of federal and state tax refunds, reporting to credit bureaus, suspension of driver's and professional licenses, liens against property, and contempt proceedings for willful non-payment. Income withholding is the default for new orders in most cases rather than a penalty applied after a missed payment.

Recent Georgia guideline changes

Georgia guideline authority and official worksheet

Data pending verification. We have not yet verified, from an official copy, the specific statute or court rule that carries Georgia's child support guideline, so we are not naming one here. Take the controlling text and the official worksheet from Georgia's own courts. The citations listed under Sources at the foot of this page are what our record carries, and listing one there is not a check of it.

Where to get the official worksheet

Every state publishes a child support worksheet or an official calculator, and that document is what a judge or the state agency works from. We do not yet have a verified direct link to Georgia's worksheet, so the starting points below are the state's own court site and the federal directory of state child support agencies rather than a deep link we cannot vouch for.

• Georgia courts , the state judiciary site from our Georgia source record.
• Office of Child Support Services, U.S. Administration for Children and Families, which maintains the directory of state child support agencies.
• National Conference of State Legislatures, child support guideline models by state, which publishes its own comparison of the guideline model each state uses, so you can check ours against it.

How we calculate this estimate

This page does not produce a child support figure for your state, and the panel above sets out why in full. The short version: a guideline figure on this site is read out of the state's own published guideline, and nobody here has read yours yet. What we were showing until recently was built by us to stand in for it, and we would rather show you nothing than show you that.

What this page does instead for Georgia

• It sets out what your state's guideline is recorded as doing, and says plainly which parts of that record somebody has checked against a document and which parts nobody has.
• It says what we were previously calculating, and what we found when we looked at it. That finding is the part you can use, whether or not we ever publish a figure here.
• It points at the document that carries the real answer where we can name one, and says so where we cannot rather than sending you to a citation nobody here has opened.
• Nothing on this page is a dollar amount for your family. The other calculators on this site still run for your state, and the filing fees and waiting periods on your state page are unaffected by any of this.

Where to get the real number

Your state's own worksheet is the controlling document, and it is the thing to work from. A licensed family law attorney in your state, or your state's child support agency, can run your figures against it and tell you what a court would be starting from.

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

Sources

Georgia courts and statutes

Citations our record carries for Georgia. Being listed here does not mean a figure on this page was read from it.

• georgiacourts.gov
• O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15
• O.C.G.A. § 19-6-15(g)
• gov.georgia.gov

Where to read more

Background reading. 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.