Mission
Federal law requires child support to be based on what a parent can actually pay, and Massachusetts has never been asked whether its guidelines do that. While the Guidelines recite that standard, the Worksheet that applies it never computes what a parent keeps after tax. With child care claimed, that can set child support higher than federal law lets the state collect from wages; the excess is still owed. No court or federal agency has ruled on whether the guidelines meet this standard. Federal approval of the state’s plan has not addressed it. This project asks the Commonwealth to correct that and states the fix on the federal law page.
Massachusetts also has the highest child support in the nation for joint custody, and joint custody here costs more than primary custody in 47 states.
I believe that the Massachusetts guidelines, especially in joint custody situations, work more as a transfer of wealth from one parent to the other than as actual support for the children. The laws are set to maximize the value extracted from the payer, with little question of what’s best for the child, ability to pay, or what the incentive structures are. They reward inflated claims and incentivize litigation.
Both problems trace to the same place: the Worksheet’s own arithmetic, the steps the form performs to turn two incomes into a presumptive order. Massachusetts reviews its guidelines every four years, and those reviews are real work. Economists compare the order amounts against child cost benchmarks and against what other states order, and the question of gross income against net has been raised in review after review. None of them examines the Worksheet itself, and its steps appear in no guidelines text and in no published review.
That gap is where every finding on this site comes from. Each figure is published with the code that produced it, so a reader can check the arithmetic instead of taking a position on trust.
A child support payor with no affiliation to any organization built this site, working from the arithmetic in the Worksheet.
The worked example running through every finding on this site (a payor at $201,000, another parent at $570 a week, three children, equal parenting time) is computed under Massachusetts's 2025 worksheet. I pay child support in Massachusetts myself, so I have a stake in the outcome, and a reader should reasonably wonder whether an interested party shaded a number in his own favor. So every figure is published with the code that produced it. Check it yourself.
The worksheet that produced these figures is model/worksheet.py, checked against the official form's own scripts on the model page. Run it on any numbers you choose.
License
Code: MIT; documents/figures: CC BY 4.0.