Child support in Texas,by the team that runs the numbers.

Texas child support is a formula. Learn its parts first.

Most states hand child support to a judge’s discretion. Texas hands it to arithmetic, then gives the judge a defined list of reasons to depart from it. If you understand the three moving parts (the income base, the percentage schedule, and the deviation factors), you understand most of what will happen in your case, and you can see where the number actually gets built.

The duty itself comes from Texas Family Code § 154.001: a court may order either or both parents to support a child until the child turns 18 or graduates from high school, whichever comes later. The duty can end earlier if the child is emancipated (through marriage or by court order), and it can continue for an indefinite period under § 154.302 when a child’s qualifying disability existed before the eighteenth birthday. One thing the end of the duty never does is erase what went unpaid: arrears survive, and they remain collectible.

One thing the end of the duty never does is erase what went unpaid: arrears survive, and they remain collectible.

Who pays, who receives

Texas support orders are written in two words worth learning. The obligor is the parent ordered to pay. The obligee is the person entitled to receive, usually the parent with the exclusive right to designate the child’s primary residence. Under § 154.010, the amount is determined without regard to the sex of either parent or whether the parents were ever married: the formula is the same for a father or a mother, in a divorce or a paternity suit.

What surprises many parents is that support and possession are separate obligations. The paying parent does not purchase weekend time with the check, and the receiving parent cannot suspend the schedule when a payment runs late. Texas Family Code § 154.011 forbids conditioning one on the other. More on what that means in practice below.

”Net resources” is not your paycheck

The guideline percentages are applied to net resources (a term § 154.062 defines with some care, and one that matches neither gross income nor take-home pay). Getting this number right is where support cases are quietly won, because every percentage point downstream multiplies whatever error sits in the base.

What counts in

Resources include essentially everything that arrives: 100 percent of wage and salary income, with commissions, overtime, tips, and bonuses; interest, dividends, and royalties; self-employment income; net rental income; and the long tail of everything else actually received (severance, retirement benefits, pensions, trust income, annuities, capital gains, unemployment and disability benefits, gifts and prizes, spousal maintenance). A short list stays out: return of principal or capital, accounts receivable, federal public-assistance benefits, and foster-care payments.

What comes out

Rent, car payments, credit-card debt, and the cost of the obligor’s own household do not reduce net resources.

From that total, § 154.062 deducts a short, specific list: social security taxes; federal income tax computed as if the parent were a single person claiming one exemption and the standard deduction, not their actual filing status; state income tax; union dues; and the cost of the child’s court-ordered health and dental insurance. Nothing else. Rent, car payments, credit-card debt, and the cost of the obligor’s own household do not reduce net resources. That single-person tax assumption is also why net resources rarely equals what a parent actually deposits each month, and why eyeballing the number from a pay stub misleads in both directions.

Two more rules keep the base honest. When a parent’s actual income runs significantly below what they could earn because of intentional unemployment or underemployment, § 154.066 lets the court apply the guidelines to earning potential instead. And when wealth sits in assets that produce no income (land, collections, an idle portfolio), § 154.067 lets the court assign deemed income to them. Self-employment and cash-income cases live in this territory, and they are document fights: the business’s books, not the owner’s summary of them.

The guideline percentages, and where they stop

Texas Family Code § 154.125 sets the schedule that gives Texas support its reputation for predictability: 20 percent of monthly net resources for one child, 25 percent for two, stepping up five points per child to 40 percent for five, and never less than the five-child amount for six or more. When the obligor also has children in another household, § 154.128 adjusts the percentages downward through a defined computation rather than a judgment call, and a separate, lower schedule applies when monthly net resources fall under $1,000.

The schedule does not run upward forever. The percentages apply only up to a cap on monthly net resources (a ceiling the state’s Title IV-D agency, the Office of the Attorney General, recalculates for inflation every six years and publishes in the Texas Register under § 154.125). Above the cap, § 154.126 changes the question entirely: the percentage applies to the capped portion, and anything beyond it must be justified by the proven needs of the child. Evidence, not formula. High-income support cases are tried on that proof.

So why do two parents with similar paychecks leave the courthouse with different numbers? Because every input above is contestable: what the true income is, what the tax assumption does to it, whether a deviation factor applies, who carries the insurance, how many households the percentages must account for.

The percentage is the start of the analysis, not the end of it.

That is also why this page does not offer a worked example pretending to answer “how much will I pay.” The honest answer depends on your income structure, your children, your insurance picture, and the factors below, which is exactly what the attorney walks through with you, on your actual numbers, at the consultation.

When courts deviate from the guidelines

The guideline amount is rebuttably presumed reasonable and in the child’s best interest under § 154.122, meaning it holds unless evidence displaces it. Section 154.123 lists what can: the age and needs of the child, each parent’s ability to contribute, the amount of possession time each parent actually has, child-care expenses that make employment possible, whether either party supports another child, education expenses, and anything else relevant to the child’s welfare.

Deviation runs in both directions: the number can move above guideline as well as below it.

Deviation runs in both directions: the number can move above guideline as well as below it. And when a court departs, § 154.130 requires findings stating what the guideline amount would have been and why the order differs. In practice, deviations are won with specific, documented evidence. Generalized unfairness does not move the number; a child’s documented therapy schedule, or a parent’s documented child-care bill, can.

Medical and dental support ride alongside the base number

Every Texas support order carries a second obligation that parents routinely forget to budget for. Under § 154.181, the court must address medical support for the child in any case that sets or modifies periodic support. Sections 154.182 and 154.1825 decide who carries health and dental coverage, with priority to insurance available through a parent’s employment at reasonable cost; when no reasonable insurance exists, the court can order cash medical support instead.

Under § 154.183, these amounts sit on top of the guideline percentage, they are child support in their own right, and they are enforceable with the same tools. The premiums also feed back into the formula: when the paying parent carries the coverage, the cost comes out of net resources before the percentage applies; when the receiving parent carries it, the base number can be adjusted upward to account for the premium. Which arrangement fits depends on whose employer offers what (a detail worth resolving precisely at the drafting stage, when it is cheap).

When the order is not paid: enforcement

A Texas child support order is among the most enforceable judgments in the state’s civil system, and the Family Code supplies several separate paths.

Income withholding comes first and is usually automatic. Under Chapter 158, support is withheld from the obligor’s disposable earnings, and most orders include a withholding order from the day they are signed, not as punishment, but as plumbing. Contempt is the courtroom path: Chapter 157 lets the court enforce its order by contempt, which can mean fines, a judgment for the arrears with interest, attorney’s fees, and in serious cases jail. The pleading standards are exacting: an enforcement motion is proven violation by violation, payment record by payment record, which is why the work begins with a clean ledger of what was ordered and what actually arrived.

Which tool fits your situation, and in what order, is a strategy question that depends on where the money actually is.

Beyond the courtroom, license suspension under Chapter 232 reaches an obligor who owes three months or more of support and has failed to comply with a repayment schedule: driver’s licenses, professional licenses, even hunting and fishing licenses. Child-support liens under Chapter 157 attach to bank accounts, insurance proceeds, and other assets. The Office of the Attorney General’s Child Support Division also enforces support through its own cases, on its own timeline, a parallel public track worth understanding before deciding where to press. Which tool fits your situation, and in what order, is a strategy question that depends on where the money actually is.

Support for the time before the order existed

When no order has ever been in place, § 154.009 allows the court to award retroactive support, most commonly in paternity cases, where the duty existed all along but no order gave it a number. The court applies the guidelines to the retroactive period; how far back, and for how much, turns on the facts of each case. If retroactive exposure or entitlement is part of your situation, raise it early. It changes both the negotiation posture and the filing strategy.

The court applies the guidelines to the retroactive period; how far back, and for how much, turns on the facts of each case.

Changing the number: modification

Support orders are written for the family’s finances as they stood on the day of signing. Texas Family Code § 156.401 provides two doors for changing one: a material and substantial change in circumstances (a job loss, a significant raise, a change in the child’s needs or in which household the child lives), or the three-year rule: three years since the last order, and a guideline calculation today that would differ from the ordered amount by 20 percent or $100.

One warning worth underlining: nothing changes automatically. Support keeps accruing at the ordered amount until a modification is actually filed and heard. Waiting is itself an expensive decision, in either direction. The modifications hub walks through the procedural sequence.

The situations support arrives in

Child support rarely travels alone. It is decided inside a divorce, on the same docket as property and conservatorship. It is the second half of most paternity cases, because the duty to support follows the legal parent-child relationship. It runs through every custody case, where the possession schedule and the support number shape each other: the schedule is a deviation factor, and the support picture often affects which schedule each side is willing to accept. And it comes back as a modification when the finances that produced the original number stop existing.

Treating these as separate negotiations is one of the quieter mistakes self-represented parents make.

Treating these as separate negotiations is one of the quieter mistakes self-represented parents make. The statute decides them in the same suit for a reason, and so do we.

What working with us looks like

Every support matter here starts the same way: a free, fifteen-minute Case Alignment Review with our intake team. It is a fit-and-jurisdiction conversation, not a sales call and not legal advice: your county, your timeline, whether an order already exists, whether the Attorney General’s office is involved, and whether we are the right firm for the shape of your case. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better suited.

When the fit is right, the next step is the $275 Strategy Consultation: a working session where an attorney evaluates your financial picture on your actual documents and walks you through the guideline number, its pressure points, and your rights and options, under attorney-client privilege. From there the case follows the sequence above: pleadings, temporary support, the guideline work, negotiation, and a hearing only if the number stays contested.

One practical note parents find useful early: the county sets the rhythm. Each of the twelve counties we file in runs its own standing orders and docket practice, and part of our job is knowing which procedural path moves fastest where your case actually sits. What the process looks like week to week, start to finish, is mapped on what to expect, and how retainers work is explained, in plain terms, here.