How to Fill Out a Domestic Relations Affidavit in Kansas

To fill out a Domestic Relations Affidavit in Kansas, you download the official fillable form, pull together your recent financial records, work through its 18 numbered sections truthfully, redact protected numbers, and sign the declaration under penalty of perjury before filing it with the clerk of the district court where your case is pending. Kansas Supreme Court Rule 139 requires this sworn financial disclosure from every party in a divorce, annulment, or separate maintenance case, including anyone appearing without a lawyer.¹ The court leans on it heavily when deciding property division, spousal maintenance, and child support, so accuracy is doing real work here.

Where to Get the Right Form

The official Domestic Relations Affidavit lives in the appendix of the Kansas Child Support Guidelines and is posted as a fillable PDF on the Kansas Judicial Branch website.² Some district courts also post it on their own sites. Before you start typing, check your case number and the exact name of the court, because those go at the top of the form and need to match the court’s records. If child support is at issue in your case, you will also fill out a separate Child Support Worksheet alongside the affidavit.¹

What to Have in Front of You Before You Start

The form does not list required attachments, but the numbers on it need to come from real documents. Pull these together before you open the PDF:

Several months of recent pay stubs, so overtime, bonuses, and deductions are visible.
Federal and state tax returns and W-2s from the last two to three years.
Current statements for every checking, savings, and investment account, including CDs.
Health, dental, and vision insurance information showing the premium for family coverage and the premium for covering only yourself.
Monthly bills: mortgage or rent, utilities across a full year, childcare, and loan or credit card statements with balances and monthly payments.
Recent appraisals or county tax assessments for real estate, and current market values for vehicles.
The most recent statement for each 401(k), IRA, pension, or similar retirement account.

Working Through the 18 Sections

The affidavit is organized into 18 numbered sections. Taking them in order keeps things simple.²

Sections 1 Through 7: Personal and Family Information

These are identification items: your residence, the other party’s name, date of marriage, number of prior marriages, and each child of the relationship with name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Section 7 covers minor children from other relationships, including any custody arrangements and support you pay or receive for them. Copy names and dates from birth certificates or existing court records so nothing conflicts with what the court already has on file.

Section 8: Income

Section 8 does the heaviest lifting on the form and has two tracks, one for wage earners and one for self-employed people.

Wage earners list the employer’s name and address and monthly gross income before taxes and deductions. If you are not paid monthly, convert: multiply weekly gross pay by 4.33 (52 weeks divided by 12 months), or biweekly gross pay by 2.167 (26 pay periods divided by 12 months). Gross means total earnings before any withholdings, and it includes bonuses, commissions, overtime, and shift differentials.³ If your employer reduces your salary for a cafeteria-plan benefit such as a health savings account, use the full gross before that reduction. Do not subtract federal or state income tax or Social Security yourself; the child support schedules already account for those.

Income is broader than wages. The guidelines include VA disability payments, Social Security Disability Insurance, worker’s compensation, military or National Guard pay, and employer-provided disability benefits.³ Distributions from a retirement plan may count if you have reached retirement age or are eligible to draw. Public assistance and child support received for other children are excluded.

Self-employed filers report gross business receipts minus reasonable business expenses. “Reasonable” carries weight. You can deduct actual costs of producing income, but capital improvements, business investments, and principal payments on business loans are not deductible for this purpose.³ Only straight-line depreciation of tangible personal property is allowed. The accelerated depreciation the IRS lets you take on your tax return does not carry over here, so a Schedule C figure can misstate what belongs on the affidavit.

Section 9: Liquid Assets

List cash and anything easily converted to it, for both parties: checking, savings, investments, and CDs. Use the current balance as of the day you complete the form.

Section 10: Monthly Expenses

This is an itemized list of your living costs, including housing, transportation, food, clothing, personal expenses, and monthly payments to banks, loan companies, and credit accounts. A few practical points:

For utilities, average twelve months of bills rather than pulling a single month, since heating and cooling costs swing hard by season.
If you share housing or other costs with a roommate or new partner, report only your individual share unless the court instructs otherwise.
For childcare, include work-related daycare, after-school care, and summer care, averaged monthly across the year.

Section 10 also has a line for support you pay or receive for others, which the court uses to see your overall obligations.

Sections 11 Through 13: Health Insurance and Child-Related Items

Section 11 asks what you pay for family health coverage and what it would cost to insure only yourself. The gap between those two figures isolates the cost of covering the children and feeds directly into the child support calculation. Section 12 covers any income or financial resources belonging to the children. Section 13 is where you request adjustments to the standard child support calculation, such as for extraordinary medical expenses or special educational needs.

Sections 14 Through 16: Property

Section 14 covers personal property, including retirement accounts and life insurance policies, with the ownership (joint or individual) and actual or estimated value of each item. Section 15 does the same for real estate. Section 16 asks about anything either party owned before the marriage or received during the marriage by will or inheritance. Kansas courts can divide all property in a divorce, premarital assets included, but the source of the property is one factor a court weighs when deciding what a just and reasonable division looks like.⁴

Sections 17 and 18: Debts and COBRA

Section 17 asks for debts not already listed in Section 10, including maintenance obligations, with the creditor, balance, and monthly payment for each. Section 18 addresses COBRA continuation rights for the spouse who is not the covered employee, which is easy to skip past and painful to miss.

If You Are Not Working or Are Working Less

Reporting zero income when you could be earning is not a workaround. If a court finds a parent deliberately unemployed or underemployed despite being capable of working, it can impute income for support purposes, looking at work history, education, job skills, health, age, criminal record, and the local job market.³ The floor is the federal minimum wage for a 40-hour week, and the court has to put its reasoning in writing. If you are between jobs or working reduced hours, report your actual income and be prepared to explain the situation.

Signing Under Penalty of Perjury

The affidavit does not require a notary. It ends with a declaration you sign: “I declare under penalty of perjury under the laws of the State of Kansas that the foregoing is true, correct and complete.”² Under K.S.A. 21-5903, perjury by subscribing a false statement is a severity level 9 nonperson felony.⁵ Beyond that, false or incomplete numbers can bring court sanctions and hurt your credibility on every other issue in the case. If you are unsure of a figure, give your best good-faith estimate and label it as one. Do not leave blanks and do not guess.

Redacting Personal Information Before Filing

Court filings are generally public, and Kansas Supreme Court Rule 24 puts the job of redacting on the filer. In any document you file, Social Security numbers and financial account numbers must be shortened to show only the last four digits. Domestic relations cases have their own path for the full numbers the court needs administratively: e-filing captures them through a separate interface visible only to authorized court staff, and paper filings use a cover sheet that the court shreds after entering the data. Every filing must include a certification that it complies with Rule 24, and the clerk will not check your work. Filing unredacted numbers can lead to sanctions.⁶

Filing and Serving the Affidavit

File the completed original with the Clerk of the District Court in the county where the case is pending. In a contested case, the parties exchange domestic relations affidavits before trial.¹ If you are filing a motion that asks for temporary support, the affidavit goes with the motion. If you are responding to a motion to modify an existing support order, file and serve your affidavit before the hearing. The court will not issue an ex parte support order without an accompanying affidavit or child support worksheet. Keep proof of service on the opposing party or their attorney, because the court may ask for it.

When You Need to File an Updated One

Financial pictures shift over the months a case takes. Rule 139 specifically requires a new domestic relations affidavit when you file a motion to modify an existing support order or when you oppose one filed by the other party.¹ Even without a formal trigger, if your income, expenses, or assets have changed meaningfully since the last one, update before the next hearing. Fresh numbers protect your credibility and give the judge something reliable to rule on.

1
Kansas Judicial Branch. Rule 139 – Domestic Relations Affidavit; Support Order and Payment
2
Kansas Judicial Branch. Domestic Relations Affidavit
3
Kansas Judicial Branch. Kansas Child Support Guidelines Effective May 1, 2025
4
Kansas Legislature. Kansas Code 23-2802 – Division of Property
5
Kansas Legislature. Kansas Code 21-5903 – Perjury
6
Kansas Judicial Branch. Rule 24 – Protection of Personally Identifiable Information