A question that comes up among parents going through a divorce in West Virginia is whether you pay more in terms of child support, based on how much time you spend with the child or children? Usually the answer to that is yes, but there are some exceptions and caveats to that. First of all, let’s talk about a situation where the parent has less than 35% of the time with the children. It could be 0% of the time. What the court will do is they are going to run what’s known as the basic shared formula. What that means is that when it’s a basic shared formula, the child support is going to be the same, no matter what and that’s just how it’s written into the law.
Some people might think that’s unfair, but it is what it is. That’s how it is actually written into the law. If a person has the kids between zero and 127 overnights, then the child support is going to be the same. Now what happens though is if you get above that 35% of the time with the child, then the child support is going to go down. Now it’s not just something where it totally switches from that point forward. It’s going to go gradually down. There’s really a big difference in many instances between having the children 50% of the time and having the children for example, 36% of the time.
The other spouse could be making a million dollars a year and the other person can be making minimum wage, but there wouldn’t be some sort of child support. The reverse side to that though, is that once you get above the 35% mark, then the child support formula totally changes. You could actually have a situation where the person is making, for example, a million dollars a year, but having the child like 60% of the time and could be paying the person who has the children 40% of the time. The formula dramatically changes when neither party has the children or child greater than 65% of the time. That’s how the child support formula generally works. This is something that one needs to be aware of going forward when trying to figure out how many days they want to request asking from the court. This is certainly a factor that one needs to know about and something one needs to be thinking about going into the future.
