Child Support Guideline Primer

In 1989, to comply with federal regulations, all states quickly, and with little critical study, adopted numerical presumptive child support guidelines. That is, each state was required to have a fixed formula for calculating child support to make awards more predictable and consistent. This also opened the door for by-passing the court: No judge is needed if child support amounts are decided by formula. It can be an “administrative” award: assigned by a government official.

The legal profession seemed to take presumptive to mean unassailable. Few challenge the amount of awards, though this is unfounded. Federal regulations require presumptive guidelines to be rebuttable to allow normal due process of challenging their appropriateness for a specific case, so each state provides for it in its statutes. (You have to find the law for your state to cite it to a judge.) However, it takes well argued professional help to do this since the presumptive formulas are so obtuse. What exactly are you challenging? Second, you have to offer an alternative you can show to be appropriate.

Instead of reducing the cost of determining sound child support, states increased it by implementing formulas that focusing away from case circumstances and made it harder to rebut the presumptive award. Also, by adopting a cost table based on intact family data and that ignored child-related tax benefits and child costs incurred by the non-custodial parent, states shifted child support from being proportional between both parents to a disproportional share on the non-custodial parent, unless those presumptions are challenged for every case.

As of 2007, 36 states and the District of Columbia have implemented a variation of the Income Shares model. There are several variations of this methodology but the majority are based on the version developed by Robert Williams and the HHS Child Support Guidelines project in the 1980s, or on updated versions based on the collaboration of William’s company, Policy Studies, Inc., and David Betson of the University of Notre Dame.

Ten states use variations of the Percentage of Obligor Income formula, commonly called the Wisconsin Model, which is based on a Wisconsin study that itself says its rough measure can only be used for low income cases, but which all states that adopted it apply to all cases. Three states adopted a hybrid of these called the Melson Model (or Delaware-Melson), and two use a different hybrid.

[Click "Formulas By State" on the side bar for a pop-up to show which formula your state adopted. Throughout this site every state reference is marked with its map giving its brand of guideline: I, %, m, or H.]

Which leads to the CostShares model. It first appears in Child Support Guidelines: the Next Generation, by the Office of Child Support Enforcement, 1994, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, chapter 11, in an article by Donald Bieniewicz. It has been refined and developed further by , with Mr. Bieniewicz’s assistance. Since it corrects the fundamental economic errors of the other models, it is both an alternative and used to evaluate other guidelines for their appropriateness to an individual case, as well as for constitutional challenges.