Kansas Supreme Court adopts updated child support guidelines

Kansas Courts

TOPEKA—The Kansas Supreme Court has adopted new child support guidelines that will take effect January 1, 2020.

The court adopted the updated guidelines through Administrative Order 307, which says they are to be used as a basis for establishing and reviewing child support orders in Kansas district courts.

The new guidelines are available on the Kansas judicial branch website at www.kscourts.org:

Kansas Child Support Guidelines (without markup)
Kansas Child Support Guidelines (with markup)
Kansas Child Support Guidelines are rules judges and hearing officers follow to decide how much child support each parent is to pay toward raising their children. At the most basic level, they guide parents to create a fair and balanced distribution of resources essential to raising children: time and money.

Child support pays for housing, clothing, transportation, recreation, health care, child care, and other expenses that would have been shared by the parents had the family remained intact.

Federal law requires states to review their child support guidelines every four years. In Kansas, an advisory committee reviews Kansas’ guidelines to ensure that the roughly $35 million mothers and fathers pay in support each month is equitable for the parents and appropriate for the day-to-day essential needs of the children they support.

Kansas has reviewed and revised its guidelines 10 times since they were initially established in 1989. The advisory committee that has done the reviews has included parents who either pay or receive child support, tax professionals with expertise in child support, attorneys, and judges. An economist is enlisted to help with the review.

The current committee spent nearly a year reviewing the guidelines and making proposed updates. The updates were made available for public comment this summer, and comments were considered by the Supreme Court before the updates were adopted this week.