Divorce in Florida With Kids: Parenting Plan, Support, and Costs

Getting a divorce in Florida with kids means going through the state’s full dissolution of marriage process, because couples with minor children cannot use Florida’s simplified procedure.¹ Along with ending the marriage, you must resolve a parenting plan, a time-sharing schedule, and child support before a judge will sign the final judgment. The statutory floor is 20 days from filing, but most contested cases with children run several months to over a year.

Who Can File in Florida

At least one spouse must have lived in Florida for the six months immediately before the petition is filed.² Residency can be shown with a Florida driver’s license, voter registration card, state identification card, or third-party testimony.³

Florida is a no-fault state. The only ground you need to allege is that the marriage is “irretrievably broken.” A second ground based on mental incapacity exists but requires a formal adjudication of incapacity dating back at least three years, so it is rarely used.³

When children are involved and the other spouse disputes that the marriage is broken, a judge has extra tools. The court can order one or both spouses into marriage counseling or pause the case for up to three months to allow for reconciliation. If the court later concludes the marriage really is broken, it moves forward.³

How the Case Moves Through Court

You begin by filing a Petition for Dissolution of Marriage with the Clerk of the Circuit Court in the county where you or your spouse lives. The filing fee is roughly $400 and varies by county. If you cannot afford it, file an Application for Determination of Civil Indigent Status and ask the court to waive it.

After filing, your spouse must be formally served by a sheriff’s deputy or licensed private process server. Your spouse then has 20 days to file a written response.⁴ If no response comes, you can ask the court to enter a default, and a judge may grant the divorce based on what your petition requested.

Within 45 days of service, both spouses must exchange a mandatory financial disclosure package: three years of tax returns, recent pay stubs, loan applications from the past year, bank and investment statements, and a sworn Financial Affidavit covering income, expenses, assets, and debts. Under $50,000 in gross annual income uses the short form; $50,000 or more uses the long form.⁵ This step is not optional.

Most Florida family courts then send the case to mediation. A neutral mediator helps you negotiate parenting, support, and property. Mediation is cheaper and faster than a trial, and many cases settle there. If you reach a full agreement, a judge reviews and approves it at an uncontested final hearing. Anything you cannot agree on goes to a contested hearing, where the judge decides for you.

Core Documents You Will File

Petition for Dissolution of Marriage, which formally opens the case and states what you are asking for.
Family Law Financial Affidavit, a sworn statement of income, monthly expenses, assets, and liabilities.
UCCJEA Affidavit, listing every address where each child has lived for the past five years and identifying any other court proceedings involving the children.
Proposed Parenting Plan with your proposed schedule and decision-making arrangement.
Child Support Guidelines Worksheet applying the statutory formula to your family’s income.

The Parenting Course Both Parents Must Take

Before a judge enters a final judgment, both parents must complete an approved Parent Education and Family Stabilization Course. It runs at least four hours and covers the effects of divorce on children and how to co-parent. The spouse who files has 45 days from filing to complete it; the other spouse has 45 days from being served.⁶ Approved courses are offered online and in person, usually $25 to $75. You file proof of completion with the court. A judge can excuse a party or extend the deadline for good cause.

The Parenting Plan and Time-Sharing Schedule

Every Florida divorce involving children must include a court-approved Parenting Plan. It becomes a binding court order, and violating it can trigger contempt proceedings. At a minimum, the plan has to cover:⁷

How parents will share daily responsibilities like meals, homework, bedtime, and transportation.
A specific time-sharing calendar for regular weekdays, weekends, holidays, school breaks, and summer.
Which parent has decision-making authority over healthcare, school enrollment and the school-zone address, and extracurricular activities.
How each parent will stay in contact with the child during the other parent’s time.
Where exchanges will happen; the court can require a neutral or supervised location if safety is a concern.

Equal Time-Sharing Is the Starting Point

Florida law now carries a rebuttable presumption that equal time-sharing is in the best interests of the child. The starting point for every case is 50/50, and a parent who wants something different has to put on evidence that equal time would not serve the child.⁷ Judges weigh a long list of factors to settle the schedule, including each parent’s willingness to encourage a relationship with the other, the child’s home and school stability, and any evidence of domestic violence or substance abuse.

If you and your spouse cannot agree, the court writes the plan. Most judges strongly prefer that parents work it out themselves or in mediation. A schedule you built around your family’s actual life almost always fits better than one a judge drafts after meeting your children in a courtroom.

How Child Support Is Calculated

Florida uses an income shares model. The guidelines estimate what the parents would have spent on the child if the family were still together, then divide that amount in proportion to each parent’s earnings.⁸ The steps:

Determine each parent’s monthly gross income, counting wages, bonuses, business income, disability, pensions, Social Security, rental, and investment returns.
Calculate net income by subtracting federal and state taxes, Social Security and Medicare, mandatory retirement payments, health insurance premiums (not the child’s coverage), and any court-ordered support for other children.
Add both net incomes together and look up the minimum support need on the statutory table, which varies by combined income and number of children.
Divide that amount so each parent covers their percentage of the combined net income.

The number of overnights with each parent then adjusts the result. When a child spends a substantial number of nights with each parent, support decreases for the parent with more overnights, because that parent is already paying directly for daily needs. A judge can deviate from the guideline amount by up to five percent without a written reason, and by more than five percent with a written explanation of why the guideline amount would be unjust.⁸

Child support is separate from alimony, and alimony has its own framework if one spouse has a financial need the other can meet. Florida’s 2023 reform eliminated permanent alimony and left bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative, and durational forms, with durational lengths tied to how long the marriage lasted.⁹

Who Claims the Children on Taxes

Only one parent can claim a child as a dependent in any given tax year. The IRS default gives the claim to the custodial parent, defined federally as the parent the child lived with for the greater number of nights that year. A state court order calling someone the “custodial parent” does not override this federal definition.

The custodial parent can release the claim to the other parent by signing IRS Form 8332, which the noncustodial parent attaches to their return. Without that signed form, the IRS will deny the claim even if your Florida divorce decree says the noncustodial parent gets to take the child.¹⁰ The custodial parent can also revoke a release later, effective no earlier than the tax year after the other parent is notified. If who claims the kids is part of your deal, write Form 8332 into the agreement by name instead of relying on general parenting-plan language.

Your filing status for the whole year depends on your marital status on December 31. If the divorce is final by year-end, you file single or head of household. Head of household gives a larger standard deduction and better brackets, but you qualify only if you paid more than half the cost of keeping up your home for the year and a qualifying child lived with you for more than half the year.¹¹ If the divorce is still pending on December 31, you may still qualify for head of household if your spouse did not live in your home during the last six months of the year and the other requirements are met.

Health Insurance for You and the Kids

If you or the children are on your spouse’s employer-sponsored plan, that coverage usually ends when the divorce is final. Under COBRA, a former spouse has the right to continue the same group coverage for up to 36 months, but at the full premium, which is often much more than you were paying as a covered dependent. The employer must notify the plan administrator of the divorce, and the former spouse generally has 60 days to elect COBRA.¹²

Divorce is also a “special enrollment” event for marketplace health plans, giving you a 60-day window to enroll outside of open enrollment. If COBRA is too expensive, a marketplace plan with income-based subsidies may cost less. Children can usually be covered under either parent’s plan, and your parenting plan or support order should say which parent is responsible for keeping the kids insured.

What It Costs

Attorney fees vary widely with how contested your case is. Beyond those, plan for:

Court filing fee of roughly $400, varying by county.
Process server or sheriff service, typically $35 to $150, to deliver the petition.
Parenting course, usually $25 to $75 per parent for an approved online option.
Mediation, with costs shared between parties and tied to the mediator’s hourly rate and the number of sessions.
A Qualified Domestic Relations Order, if retirement accounts need to be divided, drafted by an attorney or specialist and billed separately from general divorce representation.

If you qualify as indigent, the court can waive the filing fee, and some counties run reduced-cost mediation through court-connected programs.

1
Florida Courts. Florida Family Law Form 12.901(a)
2
Online Sunshine. Florida Statutes 61.021 – Residence Requirements
3
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes 61.052 – Dissolution of Marriage
4
Florida Courts. The Process – What Happens in Court
5
Florida Courts. Florida Family Law Rule of Procedure 12.285 – Mandatory Disclosure
6
Online Sunshine. Florida Statutes 61.21 – Parent Education and Family Stabilization Course
7
Florida Senate. Florida Statutes 61.13 – Support of Children, Parenting and Time-Sharing, Powers of Court
8
Online Sunshine. Florida Statutes 61.30 – Child Support Guidelines, Retroactive Child Support
9
Florida Senate. Florida Code 61.08 – Alimony
10
Internal Revenue Service. Form 8332 – Release/Revocation of Release of Claim to Exemption for Child by Custodial Parent
11
Internal Revenue Service. Filing Taxes After Divorce or Separation
12
U.S. Department of Labor. FAQs on COBRA Continuation Health Coverage for Workers