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Home » Child Custody » Child Sup­port Pay­ments Dif­fer Wildly From State to State

Child Sup­port Pay­ments Dif­fer Wildly From State to State

August 7, 2019 by Shae Irving

Photo of parent holding hands with little boy to illustrate article on child support payments 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.

Filed Under: Child Custody Tagged With: child support

About Shae Irving

Shae Irving has been writing for Legal Consumer since 2013, focusing on health care and family law. She was a senior legal editor and editorial project manager at Nolo, where she worked for twenty-two years. Shae has degrees in rhetoric and law from U.C. Berkeley. She lives in Northern California.

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