Child Support - How do Daycare Expenses Get Calculated and Who Pays Them?

Many parents of younger children are surprised when it comes time to set an agreement on Child Support that the child’s daycare expenses are handled as a separate item and may not even be part of the custody agreement. Why does daycare get handled separately from child support and who is responsible for footing the bill?

Sometimes you look at how complex the court system is to navigate for family law matters and wonder if you will ever make it through with your sanity intact. Item after item, line after line, give and take, is enough to make even the sanest person wonder why there isn’t a simpler way or in Rodney King’s words “Can’t we all just get a long?”.

Now you’re trying to make sense of day care. Whether you are a parent with every other weekend wondering why you have to split daycare costs, or the parent with all but every other weekend wondering why you should have to carry a lot more of the load than your visitation percentage, the confusion comes from the fact that none of the visitation percentages seem to apply. There is a rhyme to the courts reason.

Day care allows the child to be taken care of while the parents work. The reasoning is that both parents have a equal right to work. Therefore, the daycare costs are typically split 50/50. Of course the question of who picks the daycare provider and what constitutes daycare may still need to be defined. Sometimes the grandparent of the child will provide daycare which can lead to quarrels over how much it is worth. One parent may state that daycare is $400/month while the other parent may claim it is being given for free and the charge is designed to extort money from them. Other times a parent may want personalized day care with transportation to and from school, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and more at a rate of $1000/month and more.

While the grandparent may provide daycare to their child for free, the other parent may need to pay a ½ of a reasonable rate. Got over it, paying a reasonable amount for daycare is likely to be how it is. Paying for services outside of daycare like transportation to and from activities is not daycare. You may need to file a motion and present a couple of examples of reasonable daycare costs in your area, but you should be able to pay for daycare only and let the other parent using the extra services pay for them.
Finally, if you think that forcing your ex to go back to work to reduce your support amount is a good idea, you may want to factor in daycare at %50. If your ex goes back to work at minimum wage and you get a $100 break on support but have to pay $200 in daycare, or $400 for infant care or more for more than one child, do the math. They may be doing you a favor.