Parenting time and child support in Ohio
Ohio reduces the annual individual support obligation by ten per cent once court-ordered parenting time equals or exceeds 90 overnights a year. Below that count the ordinary calculation applies unchanged, so in Ohio the annual overnight count decides whether the reduction is available at all.
Does Ohio have a parenting-time threshold?
90
Yes. Court-ordered parenting time that equals or exceeds 90 overnights a year reduces the annual individual support obligation by ten per cent. It is a single step rather than a sliding scale: the reduction either applies or it does not.
Because it is a step, the overnights either side of it matter more in Ohio than they would on a continuous formula. Count the real nights across a whole year, including the ones inside school breaks and the summer, rather than estimating from a typical fortnight — a rotation that looks like it clears 90 on a two-week pattern can fall short once the year is written out.
- Ohio — Ohio Rev. Code § 3119.051(A). Verified .Court-ordered parenting time that equals or exceeds 90 overnights a year reduces the annual individual support obligation by ten per cent. Statutory text quoted verbatim at Exhibit 19 of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services 2023 guidelines report, because codes.ohio.gov refuses automated retrieval.
What to know before you file in Ohio
Ohio publishes a single statewide parenting plan adopted under Civil Rule 84, so the same form is accepted in every county rather than each court keeping its own. Both parents sign it, which makes it a document two households agree to rather than one a court imposes, and it is the form an Ohio parent completes before the schedule is ordered.
The Ohio plan expects the parenting-time schedule to be ATTACHED rather than summarised in a sentence, and that is a useful discipline. The attachment is where the weekday pattern, the weekend rotation, the holidays and the school breaks are named night by night — and a schedule written that way can be counted by either parent without either having to interpret the other.
Because the Ohio reduction turns on a count of court-ordered overnights, an approximate description will not settle it. A plan reading “liberal parenting time as agreed” cannot be counted by anyone; one naming the nights across a full year, holidays and summer included, can be. In Ohio the difference between 89 and 90 overnights is the difference between the reduction applying and not.
The Ohio form
The Supreme Court of Ohio statewide parenting plan, adopted under Civil Rule 84, on which parents set out the care, parenting and control of their children — with the parenting-time schedule attached to it.