Oklahoma Child Support is Statutory
Video Transcribed: What is split custody in Oklahoma and how does it affect child support? I’m Oklahoma Lawyer James Wirth. I’m doing this series of questions related to child support in Oklahoma. Most of them are governed by the Oklahoma child support guidelines, which are statutory.
You can find it in the law books. It is title 43, section 118D, and then goes down to subsection D which deals with split custody. So what is split custody? Split custody does not mean that one parent has the kids part of the time, the other parent has the kids another part of the time.
That is actually something separate that’s a little bit more normal, a little bit more common I should say. As far as to split custody, that means that you’ve got parents that have multiple kids and each parent has primary custody of one or more of the kids. So mom may have custody of one child. Dad may have custody of one child.
So how does that affect child support? How do you do child support under those circumstances? It doesn’t come up very often, but it is laid out in the statute in how’s it’s done. And it’s essentially done by having two separate child support computations.
So where we’ve got a mom with primary custody of one or more kids, those are all handed in one computation. If we’ve got a dad that’s got primary custody of one or more kids, that’s handled in a separate computation. You plug in the same numbers of income and all of that and you come out with these different support numbers.
Now, whichever one is obligated to pay the higher support number, they have to pay the difference between the two. So essentially they just have those two orders and they offset each other. And then whichever one is paying more in their order, they have to pay the difference of those to the other party and that is ultimately the child support order of all of them together.
So that is a split custody situation. You just double up the amount of child support computations you do, you offset them, and you get your number. It’s actually not that much more complicated, but it is a little bit rare to have to do that.
If you’ve got any questions about child support in Oklahoma, you’re not going to just want to take the information from this video. It’s a good starting place, but you’re going to want to talk privately, confidentially with an attorney to get legal advice. To do that with somebody at my office, you can go online to makelaweasy.com.
