Your Income Plays a Major Role in Your Child Support
Video Transcribed:
How does my income affect my child support in Oklahoma? My name is James Wirth. I am a child support attorney in Oklahoma. That’s a question we have as part of a series related to Oklahoma child support and the Oklahoma Child Support Guideline.
And it’s how does my income affect my child support? Your income will be the primary factor, along with the other parent’s income, in determining how much child support is under the Oklahoma Child Support Guidelines.
So if your income goes up, that means that your child support is going to go up if there’s a recalculation. If your income goes down, your child support’s likely to go down; if there’s a recalculation, everything else is the same. But how exactly does this work mechanically? Well, for the Child Support Guidelines, you can find them in Title 43, Section 118, and there are various sections after that.
But for the actual numbers in the graph that determines the amount of child support and how it’s split, you’re looking at Title 43, Section 119, which lays out if you’ve got this many kids and the party’s joint income added together is this amount.
This is the base child support. And then that base child support is split pro rata based on how much you make compared to how much the other parent makes. So if you make the same amount of money as the other parent, then that child support amount for the total child support will pay half of that.
You’ll be paying two-thirds of it if you make twice as much. The other parent will be at the one-third of that, although they’re not paying it because they’re not the custodial parent or the custodial parent here. So that’s how child support affects it. The more you make, the higher the bracket on Section 119 to determine the total amount.
And then it’s a comparison of your income versus the other parent’s income, determine what percentage of that amount you’ll be paying as your base child support. So the more you make, the higher the bracket is the more the total child support is, and the higher your percentage is, the more pro rata you’ll be paying of that amount.
So it can be a little bit complicated, but if you look at Title 43, section 118, I’m sorry, 119, and look at the graphs where you combine your income with the other parents’ income monthly, you go over to the number of kids that you have that determines the base support. Then you compare your income to the other parents to determine your pro rata share of the amount you’re paying as base child support. So that’s the complicated answer.
The simple answer is if your income goes up, everything else, your child support are going up, and your income goes down, everything else the same, your child support’s going to go down. But if you’ve questions about Oklahoma child support, you will want legal advice. And for that, you got to talk to an attorney privately and confidentially. To get that scheduled with an Oklahoma Family Law Attorney at my office, you can go to makelaweasy.com.
