Regardless of custody and physical placement, parents must financially support their child in Wisconsin. Usually, one parent is ordered to pay child support. To determine how much, how often, and who pays, the court considers a variety of factors in their calculations.

Many people are looking to understand how child support is calculated. In this video, Wisconsin Family Law Attorney Austin Miller of Sterling Law Offices explains the factors used to determine how child support is calculated in Wisconsin.

In the cases where one parent has more than 75% of the child’s overnight stays, the other parent will pay a set percentage of their income in child support. For one child that would be 17%, two children 25%, and the amount goes up from there.

If there is shared placement where each parent has more than 25% of the overnights in a year, then a shared placement calculation would be used by the courts. You can find a shared placement calculator here on the Sterling Lawyers website.

There are different calculations that can come into play, if someone is paying for children from different cases, or if they are low income. Attorney Austin Miller explains more in this video. 

The court will look at your income from all sources. This includes, but isn’t limited to base incomes, bonuses, and income from investments. Basically, anything that can be income will be a part of the child support calculation.

In most cases one parent will pay child support unless both parents have the children exactly the same amount of overnights and they earn the same amount of income. This is going to be rare. So, you can expect that one parent will pay some amount of child support.

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