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Calculating Child Support

In calculating child support, you need to know three things: the province the payor live in, the payor’s income, and the number of children. With this information, you can look up the amount of support payable on tables published by the federal government and most provinces. Use the table for the payor’s province, or if that province does not have a table, use the federal table. If the payor lives abroad, use the table for the province in which the children live.

The amount on the table is just the basic amount. In calculating child support, there are also what are called “special or extraordinary expenses,” known colloquially as “add-ons.” These consist of expenses like day care, extra-curricular activities, and orthodontal expenses. In other words, expenses of children that aren’t included in the day-to-day budget.

The income of the payee is not normally taken into account in calculating child support. Nor is the income of that person’s spouse, or the income of the payor’s spouse. The idea behind this is that in an intact family, a person contributes a certain amount of his or her income to the raising of the children. The children should not be made to suffer because their parent’s marriage ended.

However, there are other factors that are taken into account in calculating child support. These are things like whether the child is over the age of 18, whether the payor spends more than 40% of the time with the children, and whether paying the table amount would cause undue hardship.

Although this sounds like a straightforward matter, often calculating child support is not simple. This is because determining the payor’s income, if the payor is working at anything other than a job in which a fixed salary is paid, can be difficult. This is especially so for commissioned salespeople and the self-employed.