How Much Child Support Will I Get (or Have to Pay)?

In addition to spousal maintenance, the other monthly payment soon-to-be divorced parents have to worry about is child support.

Wisconsin addresses this issue by throwing a bunch of formulas at you. It’s easy enough to understand for experienced family law attorneys, but it can be confusing for people who don’t work with them every day.

The first thing to do is determine what category you fall in. Are you (roughly evenly) splitting the time each of you will have responsibility for the kids? Then you’re looking for the “shared placement” formula–this one compares both of your salaries and the number of nights you’ll be responsible for the kids and spits out an amount.

Will one parent have the kids a vast majority of the time? Then the other parent will pay a set amount of their pay–somewhere between 17% and 34% depending on the number of children. The important thing to note is that the custodial parent’s pay generally doesn’t matter in these cases.

What if one parent is taking one child and the other parent is taking the other? Then you need the “split placement” formula. Much like the shared placement calculator, the parents’ salaries are compared and the formula calculates the amount of support.

What if the paying parent is already paying child support from a previous relationship? That’s a “serial family” case and each kid is going to get slightly less support than the ones before him or her.

Finally, what if I making a cool $1 million a year and my ex takes care of our child? Paying 17% of that, or $170,000 a year, seems like a lot of money to raise a kid, doesn’t it? It does, so the judge has the discretion to apply the “high income payer” formula.

Once you know your category and want to get an idea of what child support might look like in your case, you can find the various calculators here. Or, you can call me and we can walk through it together.

One final note (and one that will be the subject of a future post): the judge has the authority to deviate from these formulas, but, in most cases, I wouldn’t count on them doing so.