Child support helps pay for your child's:

• Housing,
• Health insurance and medical costs, including birth-related costs,
• Child care costs,
• Education costs, and
• Food and clothing.

Children have the right to financial support from both parents.

It does not matter if the parents are married, divorced, separated, or never married.

If your children live with you most of the time you are the "custodial" parent. If your children live with the other parent most of the time, you are the "non-custodial" parent.

Usually, the non-custodial parent pays child support to the custodial parent.

You can go to court to get a child support order.

Often the court also orders the non-custodial parent to provide health insurance for the children. The court can only add health insurance coverage to a child support order if health insurance is available at a reasonable cost.

Usually, the court will order the other parent to pay at least $80.00/month. In rare cases, if the other parent has very little money, the court might not order them to pay any child support at all.

When the court makes a child support order, it orders the other parent's employer to take the child support out of his or her pay. The employer must send this money to the Department of Revenue Child Support Enforcement Division (DOR/CSE). When the DOR/CSE gets the child support, they send the money on to you.

Paying child support like this is called "income assignment" or "wage assignment".

If the other parent is not working, the court may order them to do job searches and to report their job search efforts to the court.

If you are on welfare, DOR/CSE sends you the first $50 of the child support. The rest goes to pay back the state for some of the welfare your child gets.

Judges use the Child Support Guidelines Worksheet to figure out how much child support to order.

To complete a Worksheet you and the judge need to know:

• The number and ages of children covered by the order,
• Each parent’s income, and
• Certain expenses of each parent.

On the Worksheet each parent puts their:

• “gross weekly income,”
• child care payments,
• health care coverage payments,
• dental and vision insurance payments,
• other child support payments, and
• The number of children the child support order will cover.

The worksheet allows parents and the judge to do the math the Guidelines describe.

The Worksheet calculates the amount of income each parent has for supporting your children and a basic amount of child support.

The Worksheet adjusts the basic amount so that:

• If the Recipient is paying a larger share of child and health care, the Worksheet gives them a credit and raises the child support amount
• If the Payor is paying a larger share of child and health care, the Worksheet gives them a credit and lowers the child support amount
• The credit is no more than 15% of the basic child support amount. The Worksheet calls the basic child support amount “Payor’s share of support.”

To fill out the Worksheet you need to have income and expense information for both parents. Use the other parent’s Financial Statement if you have it. If you do not know the other parent’s information, put in what you think it is.

On the Worksheet, the parent who receives the child support is called the “Recipient,” and the parent who pays the child support is called the “Payor.”

You can get the Child Support Guidelines Worksheet from the Probate and Family Court website.