Parenting Time and Child Support in Tennessee

From The Mid-South Divorce Guide, chapters 22 through 23, by
William W. Jones IV, a Memphis family law attorney and Rule 31 Listed
Family Mediator licensed in Tennessee and Mississippi. This guide covers
Shelby, Tipton and Fayette Counties in Tennessee and DeSoto, Tate and
Tunica Counties in Mississippi.

Questions this page answers

• How is child support calculated in Tennessee?
• How many days a year does the other parent get?
• How do holidays work in a parenting plan?
• What is the child support cap in Tennessee?

Residential Schedules

The residential
schedule is the actual calendar. This is the part your children will
experience.

Common structures

Every other weekend plus a midweek evening. The
traditional schedule, roughly 80 overnights a year for the alternate
residential parent. Still common, especially with long distances or
difficult work schedules.

Extended every other weekend, Thursday through
Monday, which adds overnights and cuts the number of exchanges.

Week on, week off. Equal time, one exchange a week,
usually Friday or Sunday. Works well for older children, requires
parents who live close and can communicate.

2-2-3 or 2-2-5-5. Equal or near-equal schedules that
keep both parents in contact more frequently. Better for young children
who do not do well with long gaps. More exchanges, which means more
contact between parents, which is a problem if the parents cannot be
civil.

Nesting, where the children stay in the house and
the parents rotate in and out. Sometimes used short term. Expensive and
hard on the adults.

There is no right answer. The right schedule depends on the
children’s ages, the distance between homes, both parents’ work
schedules, and honestly on how well the two of you can deal with each
other.

The things people forget to
specify

Get all of this in writing.

Holidays, alternating by year, and defined by actual
times. Not “Christmas,” but “December 24 at noon until December 25 at
noon in even years.”

School breaks. Fall, winter, spring. Defined by the
school calendar of a named school district, so it does not shift when
somebody changes schools. Fall and spring break need their own
paragraph, immediately below, because this is where good plans quietly
go wrong.

Summer. Whether the schedule changes, how many weeks
each parent gets, how much notice is required for vacation selection,
and who picks first in which years.

The fall break and spring
break trap

This one confuses clients, and I will be honest, it confuses a fair
number of attorneys who do not handle these every week.

Fall break and spring break belong to the same school year. Fall
break lands in October. Spring break lands the following March. Same
school year for the child, two different calendar years on the plan.

So a plan that alternates these by calendar year without thinking it
through can stack both breaks of a single school year onto one parent,
and hand the other parent neither.

Watch how that happens. Suppose the plan gives Mom fall break in even
years and spring break in odd years. In the child’s sixth grade year,
fall break is October of an even year, so Mom has it. Spring break is
March of the following year, which is odd, so Mom has that too. Mom got
both breaks of the sixth grade year. Then in seventh grade the pattern
flips and Mom gets neither. That is not alternating. That is a
swing.

The fix is to keep both breaks on the same parity. One parent takes
fall break and spring break in odd numbered years, the other takes both
in even numbered years. Because fall and spring of any one school year
always sit in opposite calendar years, matching the parity automatically
splits each school year down the middle. Every year, each parent gets
one break. Nobody gets two, nobody gets none.

Say it in the plan in terms of the school year, name the school
district whose calendar controls, and you never have this argument.

Extended vacation time. If you want to take the
children to Hawaii for ten days, your schedule has to permit ten
consecutive days. A lot of standard schedules do not, and nobody notices
until somebody books flights.

Birthdays. The child’s and the parents’.

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. These should always
go to the respective parent regardless of whose weekend it is. It is
standard and it prevents an annual argument.

Exchange location and times. Curbside, a public
place, the school. Who transports which direction. What the grace period
is for being late.

Right of first refusal. If a parent is going to be
away from the children for more than a set number of hours, does the
other parent get offered the time first? This is worth thinking about
carefully. It gives the other parent more time, and it also gives them a
window into your schedule and a new thing to fight about. It cuts both
ways.

Communication. How the two of you communicate about
the children, and how each parent communicates with the children during
the other’s time. Tennessee Code Annotated section 36-6-101 was amended
in 2024 to include a right to unimpeded video conferencing with the
children, at least twice weekly. Get the details into the plan.

Notice for travel, including out of state and out of
country, and how passports are handled.

The dispute resolution process. The plan has to name
one. Most name mediation before
anybody can file.

One piece of advice
about designing this

Design for the parents you are going to be, not the parents you are
today.

Right now you are in the worst period of your relationship with this
person. In four years you are probably going to be two people who
cooperate reasonably well about a teenager’s basketball schedule. Most
people get there.

But build the plan for the bad version. Specific dates, specific
times, specific procedures. If the two of you get along, you will ignore
the plan and work things out by text, which is what most functional
co-parents do. If you do not get along, the plan is the only thing
standing between you and a courtroom.

Specificity is a gift to your future self.

Child Support

Tennessee child support runs on the Tennessee Child Support
Guidelines, found at Tennessee Comp. R. & Regs. 1240-02-04. The
current version took effect October 1, 2021.

The Income Shares model

Tennessee uses an Income Shares model. The idea is that a child
should receive roughly the same proportion of parental income they would
have received if the parents lived together.

Here is how the calculation runs.

Both parents’ gross income is determined. Adjustments are made to
reach each parent’s Adjusted Gross Income. The two are combined. That
combined figure is looked up on the Child Support Schedule to produce
the Basic Child Support Obligation. Each parent is
responsible for a share of that obligation proportional to their share
of the combined income. Add-ons are applied. The parenting time
adjustment is applied. One parent ends up owing the other a number.

Your lawyer will run it on a worksheet. Ask to see the worksheet, and
ask to see it run with different assumptions, because small changes in
inputs move the number.

The state publishes the calculator and the worksheet at the Tennessee
Department of Human Services child support calculator page. Run your
own numbers before you come see me. You will follow the conversation
better, and every so often you will catch something.

Gross income is broad

Gross income includes essentially everything before taxes and
deductions. Wages, salaries, commissions, bonuses, overtime,
self-employment income, pensions, Social Security benefits, workers’
compensation, unemployment, and more.

Excluded are child support received for other children, means-tested
public assistance like TANF, SNAP, and SSI, and the child’s own
income.

If you are self-employed or own a business, expect scrutiny. Personal
expenses run through the business get added back. See Chapter 16.

If a parent is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed, the court can
impute income based on earning capacity. Quitting your job to reduce
child support does not work and it damages your credibility on
everything else.

The parenting time
adjustment

The standard schedule assumes the alternate
residential parent has 80 days a year. If that parent has 92 days or
more, the obligation is reduced on a sliding scale. If that parent has
68 days or fewer, the obligation is increased.

This is why parenting time and child support get entangled in
negotiation, and it is worth naming out loud. Some parents ask for more
days to lower support. Some resist giving days for the same reason.
Judges are not stupid and they can usually tell which conversation they
are actually having.

The add-ons

Three things go on the worksheet in addition to the basic
obligation.

The child’s portion of health insurance premiums. If
the policy covers others, the premium gets prorated.

Work-related childcare, meaning childcare reasonably
necessary for a parent’s employment, education, or vocational training,
averaged to a monthly figure.

Uninsured medical expenses. These are not built into
the basic obligation. They are the joint responsibility of both parents,
prorated by income percentage. Get the reimbursement mechanics into the
plan. See Chapter
20.

High income cases

This is where a lot of outdated information circulates, so pay
attention to the numbers.

The Child Support Schedule runs up to $28,250 in combined
monthly Adjusted Gross Income. Above that, the schedule
provides a base amount plus a percentage of the income in excess of
$28,250. Those percentages are 6.81% for one child, 7.22% for two, 7.77%
for three, 8.05% for four, and 8.66% for five or more children.

At the top of the schedule, the basic obligation figures are $2,231
for one child, $2,803 for two, $2,954 for three, $3,294 for four, and
$3,624 for five or more, before the parenting time adjustment and before
add-ons.

You will find Memphis law firm websites still citing a $10,000 per
month cap. That figure is from a prior version of the guidelines and it
has been wrong since 2021.

To get support above what the formula produces, a party has to seek
an upward deviation and prove the child’s actual needs exceed the
formula amount. Argument is not proof. You need evidence of what the
child’s life actually costs.

Deviations

A court can deviate from the guideline amount, but it has to say so
in writing, and the order must state the presumptive guideline amount
that would have applied, the specific reasons for deviating, and how
applying the guidelines would be unjust or inappropriate and how the
deviation serves the child’s best interest.

Recognized grounds
include extraordinary educational expenses, extraordinary medical needs,
special activities, and travel costs for exercising parenting time.

Private school tuition

Private school tuition is not an automatic add-on.
It is a deviation, treated as an extraordinary educational expense under
the rules, which can cover tuition, room and board, lab fees, books, and
other reasonable and necessary expenses, with scholarships and grants
factored in. It has to be appropriate to the parents’ financial
abilities and to the child’s lifestyle.

Practically, a court is far more likely to order continued private
school tuition where the child has been in that school, where the
parents have historically paid for it, and where the parents can afford
it. A parent who wants to move a child into private school for the first
time during a divorce is fighting uphill.

How long it lasts

Tennessee child support generally continues until the child turns
eighteen and graduates high school, or until the class
the child was a member of when they turned eighteen graduates, whichever
is later. Effective April 27, 2026, Tennessee clarified that support
continues through high school graduation but terminates with the child’s
original graduating class, capped at age nineteen.

There is a separate provision for a severely disabled child living
under a parent’s care and supervision, where support can continue past
majority if the court finds it is in the child’s best interest.

Support is per child, but it does not simply drop by a third when one
of three children ages out. It gets recalculated for the remaining
children. Somebody has to file to make that happen. It is not
automatic.

Modification

To modify child support, you need a significant
variance, which is at least a fifteen percent difference
between the current ordered amount and what the guidelines would produce
today on current figures. There is a separate minimum order provision of
one hundred dollars per month with limited exceptions, which is a
different rule and should not be confused with the variance
threshold.

Two practical notes. Support does not adjust itself when your income
changes. If you lose your job, file promptly, because in most
circumstances modification is effective from the filing date and not
retroactive to when your income actually dropped. And if you have a
great year, expect the other parent to file. That is how the system is
designed. Your children benefit from your good year.

Download the whole guide. All 35 chapters plus four blank client forms, complimentary, no email required. Download The Mid-South Divorce Guide (PDF)

Questions about your own situation? The Jones Law Firm, 5100 Poplar Ave, Suite 708, Memphis, TN 38137. Call (901) 761-5353.