The legislation provides us with the Child Support Guidelines, which outline the amount of child support based on the payor parent’s income and the number of children. The payor parent is generally the parent who does not have primary residence of the children. The Child Support Guidelines automatically apply in situations where one parent spends less than 40% of the time with the children.
Over this amount of time, the access parent may seek a reduction of child support and at 50%, or in a shared-parenting arrangement, the parents would pay support to one another and based on their respective incomes. Also important to consider are section 7 or extraordinary expenses, which may include medical or dental expenses not covered by a health plan, extracurricular activities or tuition expenses (among other expenses) and child care expenses, all of which are generally shared by the parents proportionate to their incomes.