VIRGINIA Part 88

Chances are, however, that your combined income won’t be exactly $1,000, or $1,050, or $10,000 for that matter. It will probably fall somewhere between two numbers. This is where you need to estimate. So, if you have one child and your combined income is actually $1,031 a month, use what the total would be for income that’s $1,000, (that’s $196, like the example above) and what it would be for income that’s $1,050, which is $203. Based on these two numbers, you can reasonably guess that child support will be about $200 a month.

A court or state agency isn’t going to estimate like this, however. Instead, it will extrapolate an exact amount of child support based on a certain percentage of combined income. The percentage used is too complicated to explain here, but generally, it’s between 10 and 25% of income. Of course, as explained below, the court or agency can’t go outside the guideline numbers without a good reason for it.

In the event your combined income is less than $600 a month, then child support will be $65 a month. That’s the minimum. If combined income is more than $10,000 a month, then there’s more calculating to do. Depending on the amount over $10,000, an additional percentage will be taken for child support – anywhere between one and nearly 10%.