Legal Question in Family Law in California

You need to have the support order modified to reflect the time share so as to reduce the support payment to $ 0.00. Contact me directly.

Child support is dependent on two factors: the amount of time spent with your child AND the respective incomes of the parties. If you significantly outearn the other party, you may very well have to pay child support. Also, 50% custody is not the same thing as 50% visitation, so if you have 50% custody but only 20% visitation, it's very likely you'll be paying support.

Outside of "basic" child support, which I outlined above, there is also child support "add-ons" which include things such as out-of-pocket medical costs which are not covered by insurance and daycare. These costs have the presumption of being equally shared between the parties.

Mr. Barne obviously does not practice Family Law and should not be answering Family Law questions. Otherwise he would know that your question cannot be answered yes or no with the information you provided.

Child support is calculated by a mandatory formula that is sufficiently complicated that there are only two software programs that the courts allow you to use to calculate it, and only one is in general use: DissoMaster. The two main inputs are income and custodial time. The income is adjusted for certain deductions and other inputs and then the program arrives at what IT says is your disposable income (you may well not agree, but the formula is mandatory). It then applies more of the statutory formula to come up with a monthly dollar amount each parent is supposed to spend on the child(ren). Then it looks to the custodial time input. It assumes you spend a pro-rata portion of your assigned amount while the child is with you, and that you owe the balance to the other parent. It makes the same calculations for the other parent, to determine how much each parent owed the other for time the children are not with them. Whichever parent owes the smaller amount collects the balance from the other parent.

As you can see, unless the parents make exactly the same amount, or at least have the same amount of "disposable income" according to the forumula, 50/50 custody will always result in some child support being owing from one parent to the other. You can also see that if the higher earning parent were to have a high enough percentage of custodial time, a lower earning parent could wind up having to pay child support to the higher earning parent. I have a client in exactly that situation. She makes around $50k and her ex over $100K, but she has so little custodial time that she pays him child support.

So as close as we can get to an answer to your question is: under a 50/50 custodial time, if you are the higher earning parent you will owe some child support; if you are the lower earning parent you will collect support. Only if you both earn basically the same would support be $0.