Imputing Income for Child Support in North Carolina

When parents are separated or divorced in North Carolina, there's usually a court order in place requiring one of them to pay child support. Most parents willingly meet their child support obligation. But there are always some who try to game the system, often by trying to come up with ways of limiting, or even completely avoiding, their obligation by purposely lowering their income or even trying to hide it. North Carolina law provides judges with a way to thwart those efforts—known as "imputing income." Here's how that works.

How a Parent's Income Affects Child Support

Like every other state, North Carolina has guidelines to help courts and parents determine how much child support parents should pay. The state used the "income shares" model in its guidelines. The concept behind this model is that both parents are responsible for the financial support of their children, and children should receive the same proportion of parental income they would have received if the parents had stayed together.

Each parent's contribution to the overall child support obligation is primarily based on their proportional share of both parents' combined income, although parenting arrangements also factor into the calculation. Learn all about how child support works in North Carolina.

What Does Imputing Income Mean?

When a judge imputes income to a parent, the judge decides how much that parent is capable of earning (often called "potential income") and uses that amount instead of the parent's actual income to calculate child support.

When Can North Carolina Judges Impute Income to a Parent?

North Carolina's child support guidelines allow judges to use imputed income in the support calculation when a parent is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed as a result of an attempt to minimize or avoid paying child support by suppressing their income deliberately or in "bad faith." When deciding whether a parent's unemployment or underemployment meets that criteria, a judge must consider the specific circumstances, including whether the parent's ability to work is affected by having a child who's physically or mentally disabled.

Even when a parent has been fired, a judge may find that the parent's unemployment was voluntary because it was the "entirely predictable" result of bad-faith conduct. That reasoning could apply when misconduct at work led to being fired. It might even apply to a parent whose termination and continued unemployment resulted from off-the-job voluntary behavior—such as sexually abusing his child. (Wolf v. Wolf, 566 S.E.2d 516 (N.C. Ct. App. 2002); Metz v. Metz, 711 S.E.2d 737 (N.C. App. 2011).)

The guidelines specifically prohibit imputing income to parents who are physically or mentally incapacitated. Also, incarceration won't be considered involuntary unemployment.

How Do Judges Decide on an Amount of Potential Income?

Once a judge has decided to calculate child support based on a parent's imputed income, the judge will then determine how much that potential income should be, based on all of the relevant background factors, including:

• the parent's recent work history and occupational qualifications
• prevailing employment opportunities and earning levels in the parent's community, and
• the parent's residence and assets.

If a parent has no recent work history or vocational training, potential income should be at least the minimum hourly wage for a 35-hour work week. But a judge could use a higher figure than that, based on the parent's individual history and circumstances.

Should You Hire a Lawyer to Claim or Object to Imputing Income?

If you feel that a judge should impute income to your child's other parent when calculating child support—or if you're the one being accused of intentionally reducing your income to avoid your support obligation—you should seriously consider speaking with a lawyer.

It's generally up to judges to determine when it's appropriate to use parents' potential income rather than what they're actually earning, as well as how much that potential income should be. In some cases, the evidence leaves no doubt that a parent is suppressing or hiding income. But many situations aren't necessarily clear-cut, and there may be valid reasons why a parent isn't earning as much as they did before.

An experienced family law attorney can evaluate your case and help gather and present the kind of evidence you'll need to convince a judge of your argument for or against imputing income. What the judge decides can make a big difference in the amount of child support you'll pay or receive for years to come, so paying a lawyer could be well worth it.