RCW 26.19.071 is the Washington statute that tells a court how to calculate each parent’s income for child support. It defines gross monthly income broadly, lists a small set of exclusions, specifies which deductions convert gross to net, sets rules for imputing income when a parent isn’t working at full capacity, and requires specific financial documentation from both sides. The net monthly income produced by these steps is what feeds Washington’s child support table.
What Counts as Gross Monthly Income
The statute starts wide. Gross monthly income includes salaries, wages, commissions, bonuses, and deferred compensation. Overtime and second-job earnings count too, subject to a narrow exclusion described in the next section.
Beyond employment, the calculation pulls in dividends, interest, trust income, annuities, capital gains, and pension or retirement benefits. Workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, Social Security benefits, disability insurance benefits, and spousal maintenance you actually receive are all part of gross income. Self-employment income, rental income, royalties, and earnings from a business you own or co-own are included, with normal business expenses deducted from the gross figure.
The guiding principle is disclosure. Every income source in both parents’ households must be reported to the court, even if it ends up excluded from the math. Only the parents’ own income drives the basic support obligation; income belonging to other household members is disclosed but set aside.
What Gets Excluded From the Calculation
RCW 26.19.071(4) carves out several categories that must be disclosed but cannot inflate support:
- Earnings of a new spouse, domestic partner, or any other adult living in the household. These individuals have no legal obligation to support children from a prior relationship.
- Child support received for children who aren’t the subject of the current case.
- Gifts and prizes.
- Public assistance, including TANF, SSI, Aged, Blind, or Disabled (ABD) assistance, Pregnant Women Assistance, and food stamps. The statute also prohibits courts from using receipt of these benefits as grounds to deviate from the standard calculation.
- Overtime or second-job earnings beyond 40 hours per week, averaged over 12 months, if the extra work is done to support a current family, retire debts from a past relationship, or pay down child support arrears, and the court finds the income will stop once the debts are paid.
The overtime carve-out is easy to overlook. A parent working 55-hour weeks to clear old debt from a prior marriage can ask the court to exclude the extra 15 hours, provided the court believes the overtime will end when the debt is gone.
Deductions That Produce Net Income
Once gross monthly income is set, RCW 26.19.071(5) lists the deductions that get you to the net figure. The list is limited to mandatory costs and a few qualifying voluntary items. Discretionary spending doesn’t reduce your income.
- Federal and state income taxes. Washington has no state income tax on wages, but the deduction is in the statute for parents who owe income taxes to other states.
- FICA, meaning both the Social Security and Medicare portions.
- State industrial insurance premiums (Washington’s workers’ compensation premiums withheld from your paycheck).
- Mandatory pension plan payments required by your employer as a condition of employment.
- Mandatory union or professional dues, only if required as a condition of your job.
- Court-ordered maintenance actually paid. Amounts you fall behind on don’t count.
- Voluntary retirement contributions up to $5,000 per year, available only if you can show a pattern of contributions during the year before the support action was filed. The court will deny the deduction if it finds the contributions were made to reduce child support.
- Normal business expenses for self-employed parents, with disputed items requiring justification.
The mandatory-versus-voluntary line is where most disputes sit. A parent who starts maximizing 401(k) contributions right before a support hearing will struggle to claim those as deductions.
When a Court Can Impute Income
If a parent is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed, the court doesn’t just take the lower income at face value. RCW 26.19.071(6) allows judges to assign income based on what the parent could be earning. The court weighs work history, education, health, age, and any other relevant factors to decide whether the unemployment or underemployment is voluntary.
When earnings records are unavailable, the statute sets a priority order. The court starts at the top and works down:
- Full-time earnings at the parent’s current rate of pay.
- Full-time earnings at a historical rate of pay, based on reliable data such as employment security records.
- Full-time earnings at a past rate of pay when records are incomplete.
- 32 hours per week at minimum wage in the jurisdiction where the parent lives.
- Full-time earnings at minimum wage in the jurisdiction where the parent lives.
- Median net monthly income of year-round full-time workers from U.S. Census data.
Washington’s minimum wage is $17.13 per hour as of 2026, so even the floor produces roughly $2,741 in gross monthly income before deductions. That figure alone can generate a substantial support obligation.
There are limits. Income cannot be imputed to a parent who is genuinely unemployable. The rules also protect a parent whose unemployment or significant underemployment results from complying with court-ordered reunification efforts in a dependency case. For a parent enrolled in high school full-time, the court examines the full picture for both parents before deciding whether to impute at all, and any imputation is presumptively 20 hours per week at minimum wage rather than full-time.
Documentation Both Parents Must Provide
RCW 26.19.071(2) requires each parent to give financial documentation to the court and to the other parent. The baseline is federal income tax returns for the preceding two years and current paystubs. For income or deductions that don’t show up on returns or paystubs, the statute calls for “other sufficient verification,” which in practice means bank statements, business records, or similar proof.
Self-employed parents carry the heaviest documentation load, because tax returns rarely tell the full story when a parent controls their own business. Expect the court to want profit and loss statements, bank records, and detailed backup for claimed business expenses.
Missing documents don’t help you. Courts can draw adverse inferences from gaps in the record, and the imputation rules give judges a framework to assign income when a parent won’t cooperate. The parent who arrives with complete records is in a far stronger position than the one who forces the court to guess.