Our Methodology

Divorce Cost Estimator

The full divorce cost calculator combines several state-specific inputs to produce an estimate range. Attorney fees, the largest variable, are calculated using your state's hourly rate range multiplied by the typical hours required for each divorce type: 5 to 15 hours for uncontested, 10 to 30 hours for mediated, 20 to 50 hours for collaborative, and 40 to 200 hours for contested.

Asset complexity, marriage length, and combined household income each apply a multiplier to the attorney fee calculation. Those multipliers are ours. No survey produced them and no state publishes them: they express our own position that more complex estates and longer marriages take more attorney hours, and that a higher-earning household retains from a more expensive part of the legal market while also bringing more to divide, so hours and rates rise together. The income steps sit at $50,000, $100,000, $200,000 and $500,000 of combined annual income, scaling the fee estimate by 0.8, 1.0, 1.2, 1.5 and 2.0 across those bands. Treat them as an editorial judgement about how cost scales with income, because that is what they are. If your situation sits near one of those lines, the estimate moves more than your circumstances did.

Court filing fees are the one figure in this calculator anybody has gone back to a source for, and only on some states: seventeen of the fifty carry a date on which the fee was checked, and the freshness line on each state page says which case that state is in. The other thirty-three carry the fee our original build gave them. Mediator fees use the per-session cost we hold for the state, which is our own estimate, multiplied by typical session counts for the divorce type chosen. Custody evaluation, real estate and QDRO costs are layered in only when the inputs indicate they apply (contested custody, homeownership, retirement assets, complex property), and the amounts are our own planning figures rather than readings from a published survey. Where a figure on this site is read from a document, we name the document; where it is ours, we say so, and these are ours.

Child Support Calculator

Our records put the fifty states on sixdistinct guideline models, and the calculator applies the one recorded for your state. Where that state's own guideline has been read here, the model is the guideline's; where it has not, it is our record's, and the state's own page says which.

• Income Shares Model (used by 40 states): Both parents' incomes are combined, and each parent covers the share of the total obligation that matches their share of that combined income.
• Percentage of Income Model (used by 4 states): A fixed percentage set by the number of children is applied to the paying parent's income alone.
• Melson Formula (used by Delaware, Hawaii and Montana): Each parent's own basic needs are reserved first, and only the income above that reserve is available for support.
• Statewide Uniform Guideline Formula (used by California): One published algebraic formula sets the amount from both parents' net incomes and the share of the year each has the children, with no schedule to look anything up in.
• Tiered Percentage of Income Model (used by Nevada): Percentages step down across income brackets, so each slice of the paying parent's income is charged at its own rate.
• Published Schedule on the Paying Parent's Income (used by North Dakota): A dollar amount is read off a published table at the paying parent's own net income and the number of children, with no percentage and no combining of incomes.

16 states are calculated from their own published guidelines: Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia. Those figures are read off each state's own schedule, or computed with its own equations where the state publishes no schedule at all, and each of those pages names the document and its date. Every other state runs on a synthetic income shares curve that is ours rather than any state's. It is a national approximation of how these guidelines behave, no state publishes it, and a court working from its own table will land somewhere different. Each state page says which of the two it is showing you.

How wrong that curve is has been measured rather than described, and it is worth stating plainly because it decides how much weight a modeled figure can carry. Of the 16 states whose guidelines we compute from, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Mexico, Virginia and West Virginia publish a schedule keyed to a pre-tax combined monthly figure for the whole family, which is what the curve is keyed to. Read against those 7 schedules at 546 income and family-size combinations, the curve misses by 32 to 86 percent on average, and it misses in both directions. At every income from $1,500 to $6,000 of combined monthly income it comes in under at least one of those schedules and over another at the same time, as much as 47 percent below one and 258 percent above another. From $8,000 up it comes in over all 7 and stays there, and at $30,000 it is 69 to 240 percent above what those states' own tables set. Near $6,000 is where it lands closest. This site used to call it a sound planning figure and the right order of magnitude. That sentence was written on one measurement, and 7 now disagree with it.

The remaining verified states cannot be used to check it, and that is a property of the comparison rather than a gap in the work. The curve takes combined gross income and returns one obligation for the whole family, so a schedule keyed to anything else is not a comparison at all. Running one anyway would produce a percentage that looks like an error measurement and is really the distance between two different quantities.

• Alaska. Alaska is not an income shares state at all. Alaska R. Civ. P. 90.3(a)(2) takes a percentage of ONE parent's adjusted annual income and stops, so there is no combined figure, no basic obligation and nothing for a combined-income curve to be read against.
• California. California fails this comparison twice over, and the second reason is the stronger one. Cal. Fam. Code § 4055 runs on NET disposable income where the curve takes gross, and § 4059 reaches that net by deducting actual tax liability plus two discretionary items, so California publishes no conversion table and there is nothing to convert through - Florida's and Pennsylvania's position exactly. Past that, there is no combined basic obligation in California to compare a curve against AT ANY income. § 4055(a) is one algebraic expression whose answer already depends on the parenting-time split and whose SIGN decides which parent pays, so the quantity this curve estimates does not exist in the statute. A percentage difference between the two would not be an error measurement, it would be a comparison between a figure and something that is not the same kind of thing. See `guidelines/california.ts`.
• Florida. Florida's schedule is keyed to combined monthly NET income and the curve takes gross, which is Illinois' position without Illinois' way out: Florida publishes no conversion table, so there is nothing to convert through and no basis on which the two quantities can be set against each other. Reading the curve at a gross figure and Florida's schedule at the same figure would compare our number against a row a Florida court would never use for that household, and the resulting percentage would look like an error measurement while really being the size of the gross-to-net gap. See `schedules/florida.ts`.
• Illinois. Illinois' schedule is keyed to combined NET income and the curve takes gross. Illinois publishes its own Gross to Net Income Conversion Table and the engine uses it, but converting first would measure the curve against a figure it was never applied to. See `guidelines/illinois.ts`.
• Michigan. Michigan publishes no schedule to read against. Its obligation is computed from six income breakpoints and marginal rates with the state's own General Care Equation, and the equation runs on NET family income where the curve runs on gross.
• New York. New York is NOT COMPARABLE for two independent reasons, and the second one is the sharper of the two. FIRST, THE BASIS. This measurement requires a PRE-TAX combined monthly figure for the whole family, which every measured member is. N.Y. Fam. Ct. Act § 413(1)(b)(5) builds income from six clauses and then subtracts eight named items at clause (vii), two of which are taxes: New York City or Yonkers income or earnings taxes, and FICA. So § 413 income is neither the untouched gross the curve takes nor the net Florida and Pennsylvania publish, it is a fourth quantity with no conversion published anywhere, and reading the curve at gross against New York's figure at that quantity would produce a percentage that looks like an error measurement while really being the size of the clause (vii) gap. SECOND, AND THIS ONE IS STRUCTURAL RATHER THAN A UNIT PROBLEM. New York publishes NO OBLIGATION SCHEDULE. § 413(1)(c)(2) states an arithmetic rule and the state's Child Support Standards Chart is that rule tabulated for convenience, which the chart says of itself while calling itself approximate. There is therefore no published row for the ladder to be pinned to, and the ladder's own rule - every rung is a real published row in every measured document - cannot be satisfied at any income. Note what the ladder would have to do if this were treated as a schedule anyway: New York's percentages stop being mandatory above $193,000 of combined parental income a year, which is about $16,083 a month, and the chart's printed table ends at $199,999 a year, about $16,667 a month. Three of the ladder's thirteen rungs sit above both, so on the Maryland precedent adding New York would drag the top of the ladder down from $30,000 to $15,000 and move every figure in this file for seven states that do publish schedules. See `guidelines/new-york.ts` and `NY_CHART_INTERVAL_READING`.
• North Dakota. North Dakota reads a dollar table at ONE parent's net income rather than at a combined figure, which is why it needed its own `ChildSupportFormulaType`. There is no combined-income row in the chapter to compare with.
• Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania's Basic Child Support Schedule is keyed to combined monthly NET income and the curve takes gross, which is Florida's position exactly: Pennsylvania publishes no conversion table, so there is nothing to convert through and no basis on which the two quantities can be set against each other. Reading the curve at a gross figure and Pa.R.Civ.P. 1910.16-3 at the same figure would compare our number against a row a Pennsylvania court would never use for that household, and the resulting percentage would look like an error measurement while really being the size of the gross-to-net gap. See `schedules/pennsylvania.ts`.
• Washington. Washington's Economic Table is keyed to combined monthly NET income and its values are PER CHILD where the curve is per family. Two mismatches at once, and the per-child one is the trap recorded on `WA_SCHEDULE_UNIT`: every value in that table is individually plausible as a per-family figure.

The calculator also applies credits for health insurance paid by the paying parent and work-related childcare costs. It applies no parenting-time adjustment to any state on the modeled path, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished. It used to reduce support past 146 overnights on a coefficient with no legal source anywhere, generalising one state's threshold to all fifty. There are at least four categorically different mechanisms in use across the country, and no single ramp is a fair model of any of them, so the modeled estimate is now the amount before any parenting-time adjustment and each state page says which rule its own state uses, where we have read it. Two are worth naming here. Texas has no parenting-time term in its guideline at all: the calculation runs on net resources and the number of children, and the state's own calculator has no field for overnights. Georgia has a mandatory adjustment we do not have the formula for. O.C.G.A. 19-6-15(g), effective January 1 2026, requires the court to adjust the noncustodial parent's basic obligation wherever a court-ordered parenting time schedule exists, with the result entered on Child Support Schedule C. Substituting arithmetic of our own for the formula a legislature prescribed would be worse than applying none, so the Georgia estimate is the presumptive amount before that adjustment rather than a complete order.

One state-specific figure the guideline runs on has never been checked against a document. Mississippi's guideline percentages came into our data at the original build and no source behind them has been opened since. They may well be right. We will not tell you they are Mississippi law until somebody here has read a document saying so, so that page presents them as the figures our estimate runs on and points you at the statute that carries the real ones.

One state gets no child support figure from us at all, and that is a decision rather than a gap. We have good reason to believe the percentages we used to serve for Wisconsin are wrong, and the correction reached us through a search index rather than out of a document we opened. Knowing a number is wrong is reason enough to stop showing it. It is not reason enough to show you a replacement nobody here has read. That page says what we found and points you at Wisconsin's own guideline. Alaska and North Dakota were the other two states in that position and both came off the list once their guidelines were rendered in full, which is the only thing that ends one of these. North Dakota is worth a sentence of its own, because what was wrong with it was not a number: our data called it a percentage-of-income state, and the guideline turned out to be a 243-row dollar table read at one parent's net income. No corrected percentage would have fixed that, which is why it took a transcription rather than an edit.

Alimony / Spousal Support Calculator

Start with the thing this section used to bury. One state's alimony formula is implemented here, in half. The other forty-nine are ours. Six states write a spousal support calculation into their own statute. We have read one of them, and the figures this calculator returns everywhere else are a national approximation applied the same way in all fifty states. Every alimony result says which of the two it is, beside the number.

The one exception is Illinois, and it is worth setting out because it is the shape we expect the rest to take. 750 ILCS 5/504 was rendered from the Illinois General Assembly's own site, and the section prints its own public act line, so it dates itself rather than leaving us to guess what it is current through. It has two halves and they are different problems. The duration is the length of the marriage multiplied by a factor the statute fixes for each year of it, from .20 below five years to .80 at nineteen, with an open-ended term at twenty. The length of the marriage is an input we collect in exactly the unit the statute uses, so our Illinois duration is that calculation and nothing of ours is inside it. The amountis 33 1/3 percent of the paying spouse's net annual income less 25 percent of the receiving spouse's, capped at a share of the two combined. We do not run it. It works on net income as the statute defines it, this calculator asks for gross, and every route from one to the other required a guess we could not state a direction for. So we publish the statute's terms on the page and leave the arithmetic to you or to an Illinois attorney with your real figures.

In the other forty-nine, what the state's recorded approach changes is which of our own calculations runs, and how wide a band we put around it.

• Formula states get 30 percent of the difference between the two incomes, scaled by a marriage-length factor running from 0.40 to 1.60, so the typical figure lands between 12 and 48 percent of that difference, in a comparatively narrow band. Both the rate and the factors are ours. No state publishes any of them.
• Discretionary states get between 22 and 38 percent of that difference depending on the standard of living during the marriage, scaled by the same factor, so the typical figure lands between 8.8 and 60.8 percent of it, in a wider band. Those four rates are ours too. The state's own statutory factors are listed on the page and shape the factor list and the likelihood rating rather than the arithmetic.
• Hybrid states get the average of those two figures, which lands between 10.4 and 54.4 percent of the difference. That is a midpoint between two models of ours rather than a model of how a hybrid state works.

Which category a state falls into came into our data at the original build and has not been checked against that state's statute, which is recorded alongside every other alimony figure in our provenance register.

Each result includes a confidence level (Medium or Low) describing how spread out real outcomes are in that state, not how accurate our figure is. Discretionary states score Low because the judge has wide latitude. Nothing scores High, including Illinois: the confidence rating describes the monthly amount, which is our model everywhere, and a model does not become more accurate because a state has a formula. The Illinois duration is not rated at all, because it is arithmetic rather than an estimate. The calculator also assesses likelihood of an alimony award as Unlikely, Possible, Likely, or Very Likely based on the income gap and marriage length, and that rating is ours in all fifty states.

One limit worth stating plainly, because our own state pages describe the rules it ignores. The modeled amount applies no state cap, on the amount or on the duration, except where we have read the statute setting it. Where a state limits either by statute and we have not read it, the limit controls and this estimate can exceed it.

Accuracy and Limitations

• All estimates are ranges, not guarantees. The calculator is a planning tool, not a prediction of what a court will order.
• Individual cases vary based on the specific judge, attorney, opposing counsel, and facts of the case.
• Self-employment income, business valuations, and hidden assets are not fully captured by the calculator. These cases often require forensic accounting that adds cost beyond our estimate.
• Contested cases involving custody disputes, domestic violence allegations, or financial misconduct can cost significantly more than our typical contested estimate.
• The prenuptial calculator changes its recommendation at $500,000 of marital assets or $20,000 of annual alimony at one end, and $100,000 and $6,000 at the other. Those are our own thresholds for changing what we say to you, not points at which any law changes. They alter the wording of the recommendation and take no part in any dollar figure the calculator returns.
• State laws change. We recommend confirming any specific number with a licensed attorney in your state.

DCE State Score

The DCE State Score is a 0 to 100 composite ranking the 50 states by how favorable the divorce environment tends to be. The score combines three sub-scores.

• Cost Score(0 to 40 points): The state's average uncontested divorce cost compared against the national baseline. Lower cost earns a higher score.
• Complexity Score (0 to 30 points): Considers waiting periods, residency requirements, mediation requirements, alimony formula type, and custody discretion level. Less complexity earns a higher score.
• Timeline Score (0 to 30 points): Contested and uncontested duration compared against national averages. Faster resolution earns a higher score.

Across the 50 states, realized scores currently span 37 to 77. Arkansas is the highest at 77, driven by low costs, fast timelines, and minimal procedural friction. California is the lowest at 37, reflecting higher attorney rates, a six-month waiting period, and longer typical case duration. The full 0 to 100 scale leaves room for future states or rule changes to push beyond the current range.

The score is a general guide only. A high score does not mean divorce is easy or inexpensive in that state. It means it tends to be more straightforward than average.