Forget Who You Think Pays
The old assumption is that the husband pays the wife. That is no longer how this works. More women are the higher earner, and since Lewis v. Harris same sex couples have the same rights and benefits as opposite sex married couples. Alimony follows the money, not the roles.
The question a court asks is simple to state and hard to answer: does one of you need support, and can the other one afford to pay it. Need and ability to pay. Everything else is detail around those two.
There Is No Formula
New Jersey does not have a calculator for alimony. There is no set sum and no set length. It is fact heavy, it is argued case by case, and the court works through the list of factors in N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b) to reach both the amount and the duration.
Anyone who tells you what your number will be before the facts are in is guessing. That includes the calculators you will find online, which are built on other states' laws and do not apply here.
What the number actually gets built from is the Case Information Statement, the sworn listing of income, expenses, assets and debts that both of you file. It is the single most important document in the alimony fight. A rushed or careless one follows you for years.
The Four Kinds Of Alimony
New Jersey changed its alimony law in 2014, and permanent alimony no longer exists. A court can award one of these, or a combination:
- Open durational. Generally for marriages of more than twenty years. This is what replaced permanent alimony. There is no end date set at the start, but it can be ended later if the receiving spouse becomes financially independent or circumstances change.
- Limited duration. Usually where alimony is right but the marriage was under twenty years. There is no formula for the length; the judge fixes it when the award is made.
- Rehabilitative. Where one spouse put their own career aside or left work to support the other's. It pays for the education or retraining needed to get their earning power back up.
- Reimbursement. Pays a spouse back for having carried the other through school or training.
More than one can be ordered at the same time. Rehabilitative alimony alongside limited duration alimony is a common combination.
How Long It Runs
This is the part people get wrong most often, and it is worth knowing before you negotiate anything.
Where the marriage lasted less than twenty years, the total length of alimony normally cannot be longer than the marriage itself. Ten years married, ten years is the ceiling. A court can go past it, but only on a finding of exceptional circumstances.
The things a court looks at in deciding whether the case is exceptional include:
- The ages of the two of you when you married and when the case is decided
- How dependent one of you became on the other, and how long that went on
- Whether one of you has a chronic illness or an unusual health problem
- Whether one of you gave up a career or a real earning opportunity for the marriage
- Whether one of you has been caring for a child or a relative with a disability
- How the property was divided, and what income that property produces
- What each of you actually put in, in money and in everything else
- Anything else the court finds relevant
Marriages of twenty years and over are the ones that get open durational alimony, with no end date fixed at the start.
Support While The Divorce Is Still Going
A spouse can be entitled to support during the divorce itself, before anything is final. That is called pendente lite alimony, which just means while the case is pending.
It is temporary, and it exists so the receiving spouse can pay for basic living costs while the case runs. It is not a preview of the final number. Courts set it quickly, on limited information, and the final award can land somewhere quite different.
That said, it matters more than people expect. A temporary order that runs for a year or two sets a picture of what the household actually needs, and that picture is hard to argue away later. Take it seriously from the first application.
What The Court Weighs
Under N.J.S.A. 2A:34-23(b) the court considers, among other things:
- What each of you needs, and what each of you is able to pay
- How long the marriage or civil union lasted
- The age and the physical and emotional health of each of you
- The standard of living you had together, and whether each of you can keep something comparable. Neither of you has a greater right to it than the other
- The education, current earnings and earning potential of each of you
- How long the person asking for support has been out of work
- What each of you is responsible for with the children
- The time and the cost of getting the training or education needed for suitable work, whether it is even available, and the chance of building up assets in future
- What each of you put into the marriage, money and otherwise, including child care and any career or education given up
- How the marital property was divided, including any payments out of current income
- Income either of you can earn from investments or assets
- The tax consequences of an award for both of you
- Any temporary support already paid while the case was running
- Anything else the court finds relevant
No single one of these decides it. A court weighs them together, which is exactly why the same facts in front of two different judges can produce two different numbers.
When Someone Hides Or Shrinks Their Income
Alimony is built on what each of you earns, so the temptation to look poorer than you are is obvious. It happens in a lot of cases.
The usual moves are a sudden drop in reported income, a bonus that gets deferred until after the case ends, personal spending run through a business, quitting a good job for a worse one, or simply not looking for work.
Courts have seen all of it. Where a spouse is voluntarily unemployed or underemployed, the court can impute income, which means treating them as earning what they are capable of earning instead of what they say they earn. The figure comes from their work history, their qualifications and what the job market actually pays.
Where a business is involved this takes real work: tax returns, bank records, the company's books, and often a forensic accountant. It is worth doing, because every dollar of income that stays hidden comes out of the support figure for years. Our page on divorce with a business covers that side.
Does It Matter Whose Fault It Was
Mostly no. The court does not award alimony, or refuse it, to punish somebody for how the marriage ended.
Money behavior is different. If a spouse burns through marital funds, or quits work on purpose thinking it will help them in the divorce, the court can and does take that into account.
The Tax Rules Changed
This one catches people who remember how it used to work, and it changes what a given number is actually worth.
For divorces finalized after the end of 2018, federal law no longer lets the paying spouse deduct alimony, and the receiving spouse no longer reports it as income. Before that, the payer deducted it and the recipient paid tax on it.
That is a real difference. Under the old rules a high earner was paying with pre tax dollars, so a larger figure was affordable. Under the current rules the same dollar costs the payer more and is worth more to the person receiving it.
Changing Or Ending It Later
Alimony is not fixed forever. Life changes, and so can the order. The party asking for the change carries the burden, and generally has to prove a change in circumstances that is substantial, unforeseeable and permanent. That is a real hurdle.
The changes that usually come up are:
- A substantial involuntary drop in your income
- A business failing
- A substantial rise in your former spouse's income
- A significant cut to your overall compensation package
- Retiring from your profession, in good faith
- Permanent disability
- The supported spouse remarrying, which normally ends it
- The supported spouse living with a new partner in something that looks like a marriage
- Long term unemployment on either side
One warning. If your circumstances change, you go to court and ask. You do not simply decide to pay less. Doing that leaves you owing every missed dollar and standing in front of a judge as the person who broke the order.
There is more on this on our Modification Orders page.
Retirement
Retirement has its own rules. The short version is that reaching retirement age does not switch alimony off by itself. You still have to go to court and ask.
What the law gives you is a head start. Once the paying spouse reaches full retirement age, meaning the age for collecting full Social Security, the court starts from the position that alimony should end. The other spouse can argue it should carry on, and they carry the weight of showing why.
Retiring before that age is much harder. There you are the one who has to convince the court. It will look at whether you are retiring for real reasons rather than to get out of paying, your age and your health, what you will be living on, and whether the two of you already talked about retirement back when the alimony was agreed.
Either way, the mistake to avoid is the same. Do not retire and then stop paying. Alimony runs until a judge changes it, so every payment you skip in the meantime is still owed, and you turn up in court as the person who broke the order.
Cohabitation
This is the fight that comes back years after the divorce is over. The paying spouse believes the other one is living with somebody and should not still be collecting. Proving it is another matter.
Cohabitation in New Jersey does not simply mean sharing an address, and it does not require the two of them to live together full time. What the court is looking for is a relationship that works like a marriage. The things it weighs include:
- Whether their finances are mixed together, including joint accounts and shared bills
- Whether they share living expenses
- Whether the people around them treat the relationship as a committed one
- How household chores and responsibilities are shared
- Whether either has promised to support the other
- How long the relationship has gone on
- How often they stay at each other's homes, and for how long
Where cohabitation is proven, alimony can be suspended or ended outright.
Now the part nobody tells you. Cohabitation is extremely hard to prove. You are trying to show the inside of somebody else's relationship, and the evidence it takes, investigators, records, months of surveillance, costs real money. It is common for the proving to cost more than the alimony you would have saved.
So do not let this shape your divorce. If you are sitting in a negotiation telling yourself that your spouse will move in with somebody and the alimony will stop, put that thought away. It happens, but it is rare, and settlements built on it are settlements people regret. Agree to terms you can live with if nothing ever changes.
If It Is Not Being Paid
An alimony order is a court order. The person who owes it does not get to decide when to stop.
If payments stop, the other side can go back to court and ask a judge to enforce the order. A court can enter judgment for what is owed, garnish wages, intercept a tax refund, suspend a licence, order the arrears paid off on a schedule, and make the person who broke the order pay the other side's legal fees. In a serious and repeated case it can order jail.
Our page on enforcement sets out how that application works and what to gather first.