Arizona Parenting Time Guidelines: Model Plans and Holidays

Arizona’s parenting time guidelines are age-based model schedules published by the Arizona Supreme Court to help separating parents divide time with their children. They are a tool, not the law. Every court-ordered schedule in Arizona has to serve the child’s best interests under A.R.S. 25-403, and while there is no presumption of equal parenting time, the statute requires courts to give children substantial, frequent, and continuing contact with both parents whenever that contact is safe.¹

How Arizona Courts Decide Parenting Time

Every contested parenting time case runs through the eleven best-interests factors in A.R.S. 25-403, and the judge has to make findings on the record about each relevant factor.² The factors that tend to decide cases:

Each parent’s past, present, and likely future relationship with the child.
How well the child has adjusted to the current home, school, and community.
Which parent is more likely to encourage frequent and meaningful contact with the other parent.
The child’s own wishes, if the child is old enough and mature enough.
The mental and physical health of everyone involved.
Any history of domestic violence or child abuse.

Two of these catch parents off guard. The cooperation factor penalizes a parent who badmouths the other or creates obstacles to contact. And courts weigh whether a parent has misled the court to cause delay or drive up litigation costs. Judges remember that kind of behavior.²

The Official Model Plans

The document most people mean when they ask about the guidelines is “Planning for Parenting Time: Arizona’s Guide for Parents Living Apart,” published by the Supreme Court’s Court Services Division and drafted by a statewide committee of judges, mental health professionals, and attorneys.³ The guide is upfront about what it isn’t: it does not set a minimum or maximum amount of time, and it does not stop parents or judges from building an entirely different arrangement. What it does is give mediators, parents, and courts a common starting point when agreement isn’t possible.

The plans are organized by age. Within each age band, options run from limited daytime contact up to roughly equal overnight time. Which option fits depends on the child’s existing bond with each parent, each parent’s caregiving experience, the distance between homes, and how well the parents can cooperate.

Birth to Two Years

Infants operate out of sight, out of mind. They need frequent contact to maintain attachment, but they also need short separations and predictable routines. The guide offers six plans for this age range.³ The first three are daytime-only, built for situations where one parent did most of the caregiving, a parent has limited experience with the baby, or work schedules constrain availability. Plan 1 gives the less-involved parent three visits of three to five hours each week.⁴ Plans 4 through 6 introduce overnights and assume both parents have been active caregivers, know the child’s nighttime routines, live close, and communicate well. Plan 6, the most generous for infants, creates roughly equal time with no separation from either parent longer than two consecutive days.

Two to Five Years

Children this age are growing more independent but still get anxious during long separations. The guide recommends that children between two and three not be apart from either parent for more than three consecutive days on a regular basis.³ Plans in this band add consecutive overnights and longer blocks as the child adjusts. By ages three to five, children benefit from structured time away from each parent, and the schedules begin to resemble the equal-time arrangements used for school-age children.

School-Age Children

Once children are in school, the model plans and the courts lean toward schedules that give each parent close to equal time. Two patterns dominate.

The alternating-weeks schedule is the simplest. The child spends seven days with one parent, then seven with the other. It works when both parents live in the same school district and the child is comfortable going a full week without seeing the other parent. The trade-off is a long stretch for younger children and almost no midweek contact.

The 5-2-2-5 schedule prevents either parent from going more than five days without the child. One parent has Monday and Tuesday, the other has Wednesday and Thursday, and weekends alternate. Over two weeks each parent gets equal time. It needs more exchanges, so it works best when parents live close and can hand the child off without conflict. A 2-2-3 rotation is a common variation, with two days at each house and the three-day block going to whoever has the weekend.

Holidays and School Breaks

Holiday time overrides the regular rotation. For Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, the usual approach is to alternate years: one parent in even years, the other in odd years. Specifics matter more than parents expect. The plan should spell out exact start and end times for each holiday period rather than just naming the day. “Christmas” means different things to different families, so the plan has to say whether it runs from Christmas Eve through Christmas Day at noon, Christmas morning through December 26, or something else. Summer break is usually divided into extended blocks. Birthdays often give the non-scheduled parent part of the day.

What Your Parenting Plan Must Include

Arizona law requires every parenting plan to address eight specific areas, and courts will reject a plan that skips any of them.⁵

Whether legal decision-making is joint or sole, and on what issues.
Each parent’s rights and responsibilities for personal care and for decisions about education, healthcare, and religious upbringing.
A practical parenting time schedule, including holidays and school vacations.
Exchange procedures: where exchanges happen and who handles transportation.
A dispute-resolution method for handling disagreements, proposed changes, and alleged violations.
A process for periodic review of the plan.
How parents will communicate about the child, including method and frequency.
A statement that each parent has read and will follow Arizona’s relocation notice requirements.

Exchange procedures are where most plans fall short. “Parents will meet at a reasonable location” invites arguments. A workable plan names a specific place, assigns transportation duties, and says what happens when someone is late or misses the exchange.

When Courts Restrict Parenting Time

Courts move away from standard schedules when a child’s safety requires it. Two triggers come with statutory presumptions.

If the court finds that a parent committed an act of domestic violence against the other parent, there is a rebuttable presumption that giving that parent sole or joint legal decision-making is contrary to the child’s best interests.⁶ Where there has been significant domestic violence or a significant history of it, joint legal decision-making is off the table entirely. The offending parent has to prove that parenting time will not endanger the child. Courts look at completion of a batterer’s prevention program, substance abuse counseling where relevant, parenting classes, and whether any further acts have occurred.

A parallel presumption applies to substance abuse. If a parent has abused drugs or alcohol or was convicted of a drug offense or DUI within the twelve months before the case was filed, sole or joint legal decision-making by that parent is presumed not to be in the child’s best interests, and the court has to specifically find that whatever parenting time it orders adequately protects the child.⁷ The parent typically rebuts the presumption by showing no additional drug convictions in the past five years and six months of clean random drug tests from a state-approved facility.

When outright denial of contact is too much but unsupervised time isn’t safe, courts can order supervised parenting time. A neutral third party stays within sight and hearing of the parent and child, and the parent and child are never left alone. As the parent shows safe behavior, the court can scale back from fully supervised visits in an institutional setting to partially supervised time, and eventually to unsupervised contact.

Modifying an Existing Order

Arizona imposes a one-year waiting period after a legal decision-making or parenting time order before you can file to modify it.⁸ Three exceptions let you file sooner:

Immediate danger: file at any time with an affidavit showing the child’s current environment may seriously endanger their physical, mental, or emotional health.
Domestic violence: at any time after a joint legal decision-making order, based on evidence that domestic violence or child abuse has occurred since.
Noncompliance: six months after a joint legal decision-making order, if the other parent is failing to follow it.

Separately, Arizona courts have temporary emergency jurisdiction when a child is in the state and has been abandoned or needs immediate protection from abuse or mistreatment.⁹ Emergency orders are rare and need strong evidence; getting one without notice to the other parent requires an affidavit showing irreparable harm if the court waits.

Relocation Notice

If parents share legal decision-making or parenting time and both live in Arizona, neither can move the child more than 100 miles within the state, or out of state at all, without giving the other parent at least 45 days’ written notice by certified mail.¹⁰ The other parent then has 30 days to petition the court to block the move. A parent who misses the 30-day window can still object but has to show good cause for the delay. Skipping the notice carries real consequences, including sanctions that can affect legal decision-making or parenting time. When a move does happen, the schedule usually has to be rebuilt around long summer and school-break blocks instead of a weekly rotation.

Military Deployment

Arizona protects deployed military parents. A court cannot enter a final modification order while a parent is deployed and has to wait at least 90 days after the deployment ends, unless the deploying parent agrees to the change.⁸ Deployment alone cannot be the sole basis for a substantial change in circumstances. On request, the court must enter a temporary order adjusting parenting time during the deployment, and the deploying parent can present testimony electronically if deployment prevents an in-person appearance.

One Tax Consequence Worth Knowing

Your parenting time schedule decides who claims the child tax credit by default. The IRS treats the parent with whom the child lived for more than half the tax year as the custodial parent, and only that parent can claim the credit.¹¹ In a true 50/50 schedule with equal overnights, the IRS treats the parent with the higher adjusted gross income as custodial. A custodial parent who wants the other parent to claim the credit can sign IRS Form 8332 and can later revoke it.¹² If your plan is silent, the IRS default rules apply based on overnights, which means the schedule you negotiate has consequences beyond time with your child.

1
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.01 – Sole and Joint Legal Decision-Making; Parenting Time
2
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403 – Legal Decision-Making; Best Interests of Child
3
University of Arizona Law. Parenting Time Plans – Arizona’s Guide for Parents Living Apart
4
AZCourtHelp.org. Parenting Time Schedule – Plan 1
5
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.02 – Parenting Plans; Joint Legal Decision-Making
6
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.03 – Domestic Violence and Child Abuse
7
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.04 – Substance Abuse
8
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-411 – Modification of Legal Decision-Making or Parenting Time
9
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-1034 – Temporary Emergency Jurisdiction
10
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-408 – Rights of Each Parent; Parenting Time; Relocation of Child
11
Internal Revenue Service. Child Tax Credit
12
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 8332 – Release/Revocation of Release of Claim to Exemption for Child by Custodial Parent