Understanding Child Support and Holiday Visitation
How does child support play into the holiday visitation schedule? I’m Tulsa family lawyer Carl Birkhead with Wirth Law Office in Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing family and criminal law for about seven years now, and I want to help make law easy by talking about how child support might play into a holiday visitation.
Now that the holidays are over, we have gotten a lot of calls about changes to visitation or custody agreements. The short answer to my original question is they don’t correlate. I’ve got clients who say they got the children for a full week or more over the Christmas holiday or the winter holiday. Why should they have to pay a full month’s child support?
How Child Support Calculations Work
The thing is, the fact that you’re getting that time is already worked into the child support calculation. The way the child support works is it looks at how many nights the noncustodial parent is going to have the child. All it cares about is where the child’s head is hitting the bed every night of the year.
That calculation is going to include the amount of times that the noncustodial parent is going to have the child over the holiday visitations. The matching number you’re looking for is 121. That’s the bare minimum number of overnights that a noncustodial parent needs to have to start having it affect their child support amount.
Standard Visitation Schedules
Let’s say you’re on a standard visitation schedule. Most of those aren’t going to have enough overnights worked into them for there to be a credit, even with the holidays, even if you’re getting the Christmas break every other time, even if you’re splitting the summers. It doesn’t give you enough nights for that to play into whether or not your child support is going to be lowered.
Sometimes it will. Let’s say you’re getting the full Christmas break every time. You’re getting the full summer break every time. You’re getting a full spring break. You’re getting a full fall break. You’re getting a full Thanksgiving break. Every time the child’s not in school, they’re going to be with you.
Extended Holiday Visitation Impact
Then even if you’re on an every-other-weekend schedule, all of that holiday time might be enough to bump it up to where you’re starting to get credit over your child support amount. Short of something like that, just because you’re going to have the child a little bit longer for this one month out of the year, it’s not going to be enough to justify reducing the child support that you paid for that month.
Contact Us for Guidance
If you have questions about this, or if you don’t think that your child support has been calculated correctly, absolutely give us a call. I’m Tulsa child support attorney Carl Birkhead with Wirth Law Office, and I want to help make law easy. Call us at 918-879-1681 to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session.
