After they separate, one parent usually has to give the other parent money to help support the children. This is called child support. Parents, guardians, and sometimes step-parents have a legal duty to support their children, even if they don’t see or take care of them. The child support laws are based on the idea that children should continue to benefit from the ability of both parents to support them.
Child support is the child’s legal right, even though it is money paid to their parent or guardian. This means that a parent can’t “bargain away” child support. The court usually won’t accept an agreement that says one parent doesn’t have to pay child support in exchange for something else.
The parent who the child lives with most of the time is entitled to get child support from the parent the child doesn’t live with (called the payor). This is to help with the costs of raising the child. If the child spends the same or almost the same amount of time with each parent, the parent with the higher income usually has to pay child support to the other parent.
A parent can’t stop the other parent from having parenting time or contact because they haven’t paid or have fallen behind on child support payments. Child support and time with the child are separate family law issues.
Child support amount
The amount of child support that must be paid in BC is based on the Federal Child Support Guidelines (the guidelines), which are made up of a set of rules and tables. Courts use the guidelines and the tables to set child support.
To calculate the child support amount you can expect in your situation, you can look up the Child Support Tables. Go to the Department of Justice Canada website. Click Family Law and then scroll to choose Child Support. On that page, click the link to “Look up child support amounts.”
Support amounts are based on how much gross income the payor earns in a year and how many children you have together. The support amounts are different for each province. Like the courts, you would use the guideline tables for the province where the payor lives and works, even if the children live in another province.
To use the child support tables, you need the payor’s financial information. (If you have a shared or split parenting arrangement, both parents’ incomes are needed to calculate the support.) It’s important that you both honestly share all the up-to-date information you’d need if you went to court. If one of you doesn’t and the other parent finds out that what you provided to them was not true, incomplete, or inaccurate, they could go to court to have the support amount changed.
If you apply for child support in court, the person asked to pay has to provide you with a completed financial statement and attach tax returns and notices of assessment and reassessment for the past three years.
| If they’re | they also need to provide |
| an employee | their most recent statement of earnings |
| receiving Employment Insurance/EI | their three most recent benefit statements |
| receiving social assistance | a statement confirming the amount they receive |
If a person who has to provide financial information doesn’t do so, a court might estimate what their income is. This is called imputing income. The payor would have to pay child support based on that imputed income amount.
For Indigenous families
If the payor is a Status Indian who lives and works on reserve and doesn’t have to pay provincial or federal income tax, the courts adjust the Federal Child Support Guidelines income amount upward. The child gets more support because the payor’s income is untaxed. This adjustment is called grossing up income. It’s very important to know for sure whether the payor gets non-taxable income.
For Indigenous families, the courts also look at the financial help a child gets from their Nation for education expenses when they decide how much child support the parent or guardian must pay for the child.
If you have questions about child support, talk to a lawyer. See Help from a lawyer for where to find a lawyer.
Special or extraordinary expenses
The Federal Child Support Guidelines tables contain the basic amounts for child support (for food, shelter, and clothing). Most parents share an amount on top of basic child support for special and extraordinary expenses. These are extra expenses that are:
- necessary, because they’re in the child’s best interests (for example, if your child has a special talent), and
- reasonable, based on the family’s financial situation and whether the cost is affordable
Special expenses include:
- child care expenses;
- the portion of your medical and dental insurance premiums that provides coverage for your child;
- your child’s health care needs if the cost isn’t covered by insurance (for example, orthodontics, counselling, speech therapy, medication, or eye care, such as glasses); and
- post-secondary education expenses.
Extraordinary expenses include:
- extracurricular activities, and
- educational expenses other than post-secondary education (such as private school).
Usually, both parents contribute to the cost of special and extraordinary expenses in proportion to their gross annual incomes.
These expenses can be set out in an agreement or court order.
Undue hardship
If you think you won’t have enough money to support yourself after you pay child support, you can ask to pay a different amount. You can claim you’ll suffer undue hardship because paying the required amount of child support would make your household’s standard of living lower than the recipient’s.
If you’re the payor, you have to prove that the payments would be “undue” or exceptional, excessive, or disproportionate. Some examples of situations that can cause undue hardship include having:
- an unusual or excessive amount of debt
- to make support payments for children from another family (for example, from a previous marriage)
- to support a disabled or ill person
- to spend a lot of money to visit the children (for example, airfare to another city)
You can also claim undue hardship if you receive child support payments and you think the amount in the Federal Child Support Guidelines table isn’t enough to support your child.
In either case, you can ask the court to change the child support amount. Talk to a lawyer to find out if the court might consider your situation to be undue hardship.
How long child support lasts
Child support is usually payable for children:
- under age 19, and
- 19 or older if they can’t support themselves because of illness, disability, or some other reason, including going to school full-time.
How to change a child support agreement or order
If you have a child support agreement, you can change it at any time by making a new one if you and the other person both agree.
If the other person doesn’t agree with a change you want to make, you can apply to court to set aside (cancel) all or part of the agreement. The court might:
- replace the unfair provisions with a court order
- set aside your agreement if it’s different from what the court would have ordered under the law.
The Child Support Guidelines and court rules say that parents should exchange financial information every year. The amount of child support to be paid might increase or decrease based on that. If you and the other parent can’t agree, you can try mediation. If you can’t agree, you can go to court to ask for a court order.
If there’s a court order in place, either parent can make a court application to apply to lower or raise child support payments if there’s a change in circumstances, such as:
- a long-term income change for the payor,
- a change to a child’s special or extraordinary expenses, or
- a change in a child’s living arrangements or contact (such as where the child moves to live with the other parent, or divides their time between parents differently).
The court can also change the order if:
- circumstances have changed so much that a court would make a different order now,
- one person didn’t provide all the necessary financial information when the order was made, or
- important new information wasn’t available when the order was made.
The Supreme Court Family Rules , the Provincial Court (Family) Rules , and the Federal Child Support Guidelines all say when a payor and a recipient need to give financial information to each other.
Child support and income tax
Money paid under child support orders made since May 1, 1997, isn’t considered taxable income for the recipient or a tax deduction for the payor. Orders made before May 1, 1997, still have tax consequences.
See the Canada Revenue Agency website for details and search for “support payments.”
BC Family Maintenance Agency
Once you have an agreement filed at the court registry or you have an order for child support, you can enroll it with the BC Family Maintenance Agency or BCFMA, (formerly know as the BC Family Maintenance Enforcement Program, or FMEP). The BCFMA is a free BC government program that helps monitor and collect any support owed to you. You don’t have to wait until the payments are late to register. You can register the order or agreement immediately after it’s made. Sometimes it’s easier to have a third party to keep track of payments, and to receive and send them.
See Other free legal services for BCFMA contact information.