What's in a child support answer
Each state page explains which guideline model that state uses, what counts as income, how parenting time and add-ons such as child care and health insurance change the amount, and then lets you run your own numbers. Every legal figure is tied to a cited source — see our methodology for how we verify each one.
Three models, one federal floor
The National Conference of State Legislatures groups state guidelines into three models:
- Income shares (41 states) — built on the idea that a child should receive the same proportion of parental income as if the parents lived together, so both parents' incomes count.
- Percentage of income (six states: Alaska, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Texas and Wisconsin) — support is a percentage of the paying parent's income alone.
- Melson formula (Delaware, Hawaii and Montana) — a more complex version of income shares that first protects each parent's basic needs.
The District of Columbia uses a hybrid of the percentage and income-based approaches. Whatever the model, a federal rule (45 CFR 302.56) requires every state guideline to consider all of the paying parent's income, include a low-income adjustment, take a parent's real circumstances into account before imputing income, and not treat incarceration as voluntary unemployment.