Child Sup­port Pay­ments Dif­fer Wildly From State to State

If you moved to a neigh­bor­ing state, would you believe your monthly child sup­port pay­ment could dou­ble? A new study shows strik­ing vari­a­tions in child sup­port pay­ments from state to state.

For exam­ple, a divorced mom liv­ing in New­bury, Ver­mont with two young kids might receive $519 per month in child sup­port. But a par­ent in iden­ti­cal cir­cum­stances liv­ing in nearby Haver­hill, New Hamp­shire would receive $1,035.

The study, con­ducted by Cus­tody X Change, based its cal­cu­la­tions on a hypo­thet­i­cal divorced cou­ple with two kids, ages seven and ten. In this sce­nario, the mother makes $45,000 and the father earns $55,000. Mom has 65% of the par­ent­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties while dad, who doesn’t have pri­mary cus­tody, makes up the other 35%. (This 65% to 35% split is the one that U.S. judges most com­monly order, accord­ing to another study.)

The study found that pay­ments for this fam­ily ranged from a low of $402 in Vir­ginia to a high of $1,187 in Massachusetts.

Dif­fer­ences Don’t Depend on Cost of Liv­ing or Polit­i­cal Affiliation

If you went look­ing for a rea­son­able expla­na­tion for these dif­fer­ences, you prob­a­bly would­n’t find one. The research showed that the dif­fer­ences don’t depend on the state’s cost of liv­ing or on its dom­i­nant politics—average awards from Red and Blue states for the hypo­thet­i­cal fam­ily were just $13 apart.

The wildly vary­ing amounts most likely arise from the legal rules that require each state to develop child sup­port guide­lines. These guide­lines are sup­posed to help state judges make appro­pri­ate and con­sis­tent child sup­port awards. Some states focus their guide­lines on the cost of liv­ing in the state while oth­ers don’t. Some use cur­rent data while oth­ers don’t seem to refer to any evi­dence at all. Given this, it’s no won­der that nation­wide out­comes are scattershot.

But It’s Not That Easy to Change a Child Sup­port Payment

Don’t make the mis­take of think­ing you can raise or lower a child sup­port pay­ment by sim­ply mov­ing house. The rules for estab­lish­ing or chang­ing child sup­port pay­ments are much more com­pli­cated than that. To learn more about it, see Can You Change Child Sup­port Pay­ment Amounts By Mov­ing to a Dif­fer­ent State?

More Infor­ma­tion

To learn more about the study, and to see the rank­ing for each state, visit Cus­tody X Change.

To get more Child Cus­tody infor­ma­tion and resources for your county and state, see Legal Consumer’s child cus­tody learn­ing cen­ter.