How to Fill Out and File a Missouri Parenting Plan Form

In any Missouri divorce, paternity, or custody case, each parent must file a proposed parenting plan within 30 days of service of process or the filing of an entry of appearance, whichever comes first.¹ The Missouri parenting plan form comes in two parts: Part A covers custody and visitation, and Part B (Form CAFC501) covers child support and includes the Form 14 worksheet. Both are free from the Missouri Courts self-representation website or your circuit clerk.² Parents can submit one joint plan or file competing plans, and leaving required sections blank will stall the case.

Downloading the Right Documents

Part A is a PDF titled “Parenting Plan – Children” on the Missouri Courts website. Part B is a separate document, Form CAFC501, which includes Form 14 and the related financial worksheets.³ Paper copies are available at the circuit clerk’s office in the county where your case is filed. You need both parts; filing only one leaves the plan incomplete.

Choosing Legal and Physical Custody

The first substantive choice on Part A is whether you are proposing joint or sole custody for both legal custody and physical custody. Legal custody governs decisions about education, healthcare, extracurricular activities, child care providers, and religious upbringing.¹ Physical custody describes where the child actually lives.

Missouri law starts from a rebuttable presumption that equal or approximately equal parenting time serves the child’s best interest. A parent asking for something other than a roughly 50/50 schedule has to show by a preponderance of the evidence why a different arrangement fits the child. The presumption can be overcome by the parents’ own agreement, by the eight statutory best-interest factors (parental wishes, the child’s need for both parents, relationships with family members, each parent’s willingness to support the other’s contact, the child’s adjustment to home and school, mental and physical health, relocation intent, and the child’s own preference), or by a finding of a pattern of domestic violence.⁴

If domestic violence is part of your case, flag it clearly on the plan and in any accompanying motion. A finding that a pattern of abuse occurred automatically rebuts the equal-time presumption, and if a court still awards any custody to the abusive parent, the judge must enter written findings explaining why and must craft custody and visitation to protect the child and the victim.⁴

Writing a Residential Schedule That Will Actually Work

The residential schedule is the longest part of the form and the piece most likely to cause trouble later if it is vague. The statute requires a specific written schedule for every child with each parent.¹ The form gives you preset options (Schedule J, Modified Schedule J, or an attached custom schedule), or you can draft your own.²

Whatever schedule you choose, it has to address every one of these items:

The recurring weekday and weekend rotation.
Major holidays, specified year by year (most plans alternate).
School holidays and breaks for winter, spring, and summer.
The child’s birthday, Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day.
Exact transfer times and the specific location where exchanges happen.
Transportation responsibilities, including who drives, who pays for travel, and how extraordinary travel costs are split.
Telephone and electronic contact with the non-custodial parent.
A procedure for requesting short-term schedule swaps, with notice requirements.

Use precise language. Write “Friday at 6:00 p.m.” rather than “Friday evening.” A vague schedule is unenforceable, which means that if a disagreement escalates, neither law enforcement nor the court has anything concrete to apply. If supervised visitation or supervised exchanges are needed, the form has a section to name the supervisor, the location, and the reason for the restriction.

Decision-Making, Communication, and Dispute Resolution

In the legal custody section, you specify, category by category, how you and the other parent will handle decisions about education, medical care, healthcare providers, child care, extracurricular activities, and religious upbringing.¹ For each one, you choose joint decision-making or assign the final call to a single parent. If you are proposing no shared decision-making on any topic, you must explain why.

Every plan also needs a dispute resolution procedure for disagreements about the plan itself. The form offers three options: counseling, mediation, or another process you describe.² You also have to state how the cost will be divided. Mediation is the most common choice; professional family mediators in Missouri typically charge between $150 and $500 per hour, though many courts offer reduced-cost programs. Setting out a dispute resolution method in advance keeps routine disagreements from turning into new court motions.

The communication protocols section covers how school and activity notices are shared, how each parent keeps the other updated on contact information, and standards of conduct around the child. These provisions look minor next to the custody schedule, but they prevent the low-grade friction that often triggers larger conflicts.

Completing Part B and Form 14

Part B is where the money lives. Its centerpiece is Form 14, the Child Support Amount Calculation Worksheet, which produces the presumed monthly child support figure.⁵ You have to complete Form 14 even if both parents already agree on a support number, because the court needs to see the calculation before it approves anything.

Form 14 starts with each parent’s gross monthly income: wages, salaries, commissions, bonuses, self-employment earnings, and most other regular sources. After the parents’ adjusted gross incomes are combined, you look up the basic child support obligation on the schedule inside the form, matched to the number of children. That combined obligation is then split based on each parent’s share of total income.⁶

Several adjustments stack on top of the basic amount:

The monthly cost of the children’s health and dental insurance, with the form asking which parent carries the policy and what the children’s portion of the premium costs.³
Work-related child care expenses tied to a parent’s employment.
An overnight credit for the paying parent, calculated from the percentage of overnights the child spends with them. This is where the residential schedule you wrote in Part A directly moves the dollar figure.
Additional child-rearing costs such as tutoring, camps, and athletic fees.

After credits are subtracted, Line 12 gives you the presumed child support amount. If the paying parent’s income falls in the shaded area of the obligation schedule, run a second calculation using only that parent’s income and use the lower result.⁶ Either parent can ask the court to deviate from the Form 14 figure, but the court expects a written explanation of why that number would be unjust.

Uninsured Medical Expenses

Part B requires you to designate how uninsured medical, dental, vision, and psychological expenses will be split. The form sets a procedure: the parent who pays an uncovered expense has 30 days to send the bill to the other parent, and the other parent’s share tracks the income percentages already calculated on Form 14.³ Predictable extraordinary medical costs — ongoing therapy, standing prescriptions — should be listed separately so they can be built into Form 14 from the start.

College and Extraordinary Expenses

Part B also has a section on post-secondary education costs. Missouri’s standard parenting plan caps college expenses at the rate charged by the University of Missouri at Columbia and sets eligibility requirements the child must meet to keep receiving support during college.³ Extraordinary child-rearing costs like tutoring, specialized camps, and competition fees get their own section with their own payment percentages.

Tax Dependency

The plan has to say which parent claims each child as a dependent for federal income tax purposes. Under IRS rules, the custodial parent is the parent with whom the child lived for the greater number of nights during the year, and that parent is generally entitled to claim the child. When overnights are exactly equal, the IRS treats the parent with the higher adjusted gross income as the custodial parent.⁷

A custodial parent can release the claim to the noncustodial parent by signing IRS Form 8332, which the other parent then attaches to their return.⁸ Many Missouri plans alternate the claim year by year, especially with multiple children. Whatever you put in the plan becomes part of the court order, so make the arrangement match your actual overnight schedule. The IRS applies its own rules regardless of what a state court orders, and a mismatch can trigger audits for both parents.

The Relocation Acknowledgment

Part A includes an acknowledgment of Missouri’s relocation rules, so both parents are on notice from the day the plan is signed. If either parent later plans to move the child’s primary residence for 90 days or more, Missouri law requires written notice by certified mail, return receipt requested, at least 60 days before the move.⁹

That notice must include the new address (or at least the city if the exact address is unknown), the new home phone number, the move date, the reasons for relocating, and a proposed revised custody schedule.⁹ The non-relocating parent then has 30 days to file a motion opposing the move with a supporting affidavit. If no motion is filed in time, the relocating parent can go. If the move is contested, the parent who wants to move carries the burden of proving the relocation is made in good faith and in the child’s best interest. Relocation intent is also one of the eight custody factors, so if you already know you may need to move, address it in the plan rather than letting it surface later.

International Travel and Passports

Shared custody complicates getting a child’s passport. Federal law requires both parents to appear in person with a child under 16 for a passport application.¹⁰ A parent who cannot attend must submit a notarized Form DS-3053 (Statement of Consent) with a photocopy of their ID, filed within 90 days of notarization.

A parent with sole legal custody can apply alone by providing the court order granting sole custody, a birth certificate listing only one parent, or the other parent’s death certificate.¹¹ If the other parent cannot be located at all, Form DS-5525 with a sworn statement of the search efforts can substitute. The parenting plan is the right place to settle whether either parent needs the other’s written consent before taking the child abroad, which heads off a standoff at the passport counter.

Military Deployment

Active-duty service members have an extra layer to think about. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act requires courts to grant a stay of at least 90 days in any civil proceeding, including custody cases, when a service member requests it because of military duties.¹²

Military parents with custody or visitation must also keep a Family Care Plan naming a guardian to care for the child during deployments. The Family Care Plan is a military administrative document and does not override or replace a court-ordered parenting plan, nor can it change custody.¹³ If your parenting plan does not account for deployment, you can end up with conflicting obligations between military orders and the court order. Build in flexibility: name a temporary custodian for deployment periods and specify how make-up parenting time will work when the service member returns.

Filing the Completed Plan

Once both parts are complete, file them with the clerk of the circuit court in the county where your case is pending. Missouri attorneys in good standing must file through the Missouri Electronic Filing System.¹⁴ Self-represented parents generally file paper copies at the courthouse, although some counties now accept e-filing from self-represented litigants. Check with your local clerk.

Filing fees vary by county for a new domestic relations case involving children. Clay County, for example, charges $197.50; Morgan County charges $132.50. Most counties fall in that range. If you cannot afford the fee, you can file a motion for a fee waiver (sometimes called proceeding in forma pauperis) with financial documentation.

The judge reviews the plan to confirm it complies with Missouri statutes and serves the child’s best interest. In uncontested cases, that review mostly checks that every required section is filled in and that the Form 14 math holds together. A judge can reject a plan that looks harmful to the child or leaves mandatory sections blank. Once approved, the plan is incorporated into the final judgment and becomes a binding court order. Violating it can result in contempt of court.

Changing the Plan Later

Jobs change, children grow, and parenting plans sometimes need to change too. Missouri allows modification of a custody decree when facts have arisen since the original order (or were unknown to the court at the time) that amount to a change in circumstances, and the modification is necessary to serve the child’s best interests.¹⁵ There is no mandatory waiting period; the Missouri Supreme Court has held that a court need not wait for harmful consequences to appear before acting.

To modify, file a motion in the same court that issued the original order, along with a new proposed parenting plan. The filing fee tracks the modification fee in your county (Clay County charges $197.50 for modifications involving children). The change-in-circumstances standard governs major custody shifts; smaller adjustments to parenting-time details do not require a substantial change, just one that makes the adjustment appropriate.

1
Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Missouri Code 452.310 – Petition, Contents, Service, How, Rules to Apply, Defenses Abolished, Parenting Plans Submitted, When, Content, Exception
2
Missouri Courts. Parenting Plan – Children
3
Missouri Courts. Parenting Plan Part B Form CAFC501
4
Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Missouri Code 452.375 – Custody
5
Missouri Courts. Form 14 Child Support Amount Calculation Worksheet
6
Missouri Courts. Directions, Comments for Use and Examples for Form 14
7
Internal Revenue Service. Divorced or Separated Individuals
8
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 8332, Release/Revocation of Release of Claim to Exemption for Child by Custodial Parent
9
Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Missouri Code 452.377 – Relocation
10
U.S. Department of State. Apply for a Child’s Passport Under 16
11
U.S. Department of State. Statement of Consent – U.S. Passport Issuance to a Child
12
On the Civil Side. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act – Requirements When a Servicemember Requests a Stay or a Continuance
13
U.S. Army. Family Care Plan
14
Missouri Courts. Missouri Electronic Filing System Brochure
15
Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Missouri Code 452.410 – Custody, Decree, Modification of, When