March 2, 2026
1. How Do Courts in Connecticut Determine Child Support
Connecticut Courts use the Connecticut Child Support Guidelines to determine the amount of child support that a parent must pay. Judges take Child Support very seriously. Often, parties want to make their own determination of how much child support should be paid. However, parties who wish to make their own determination of how much child support should be paid will find significant limitations on how much they can do that. Even if the parties agree on a child support amount, the Court will demand to have the Connecticut Child Support Guidelines completed and filed with the Court before it will issue a judgment.
These guidelines support a “Shares Model” to compute child support. The “Shares Model” takes into consideration the amount that the Court presumes a family would spend on a child if the family had remained intact. The idea is to make sure the same amount is used to support the child now that the parents are no longer living together. The guidelines base this total amount of support by the parents’ on combined net incomes.
One of the complications of computing a party’s net income is making sure you include all income from all sources, and that you include only allowable deductions. Just because something is deducted from your paycheck does not mean that you can deduct it from your income in figuring your child support amount.
Once you arrive at the net incomes for both parties, the guidelines direct you to a place in the guidelines where you can see the total amount of support which it presumes the family would have paid if it had remained intact. Then you are required to figure each parent’s contribution to this amount based on the percentage of each parent’s income. So if your income is Seventy five percent of the combined net income, then your share of the total child support amount would be Seventy five percent.
Computing a party’s income and net income is not always simple. Nor is it easy to make sure you have completed the guidelines correctly. In addition, there are considerations for prior orders of alimony or child support. To make sure you are paying or receiving the correct amount of child support, contact the Law Office of Kevin L. Hoffkins.
2. Can the Courts Order a Different Amount than the Child Support Guidelines Require?
Once people see how much they have to pay in child support, they often seek to find ways to reduce their child support obligation. Although the Child Support Guidelines allow for some deviations from the basic child support amount, these deviations can be difficult to get approved by a judge.
The only deviation criteria that can be considered are those listed in the Guidelines or on the Child Support Worksheet. The 2025 case of Czeslaw Lukasik v. Karolina Kopinska 231 Conn. App. 245 (2025), is very instructive on when each of these criteria can be used to deviate from the Guidelines. This case dealt with each of the following criteria.
One of the listed criteria is “coordination of total family support”. However, the Appellate Court has said that this criteria is only available to divorcing couples. They believed that couples who had never been married were coordinating any other support like alimony or property distribution.
Another commonly used deviation criteria is “Best Interests of the Child.” To get this deviation, the Court must find what specific needs of the child that will be met by the deviation, and state these needs on the record.
Finally, another commonly cited deviation criteria is “Total Tax Planning”. While this is a criteria, the Courts have said there must be more to the tax planning than just allocation of the dependency exemption.
The Law Office of Kevin L. Hoffkins regularly represents both fathers and mothers in Court on child support issues. Contact the Law Office of Kevin L. Hoffkins for a consultation to discuss your child support issue.
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