What does child support cover in Illinois?
Often clients will ask their divorce lawyer what child support covers. Unfortunately, the legislature has not yet revisited the child support guidelines since they were enacted more than 20 years ago. And Illinois is not in the mainstream in terms of the guidelines we have chosen (not following the income shares model). Accordingly, there is a lack of clarity in Illinois regarding what child support covers. Practice differs often from county to county and from judge to judge. While it is clear from case law that in divorce cases, child support does not cover day care expenses, there is far less clarity about whether child support should cover extracurricular expenses. There are a host of issues necessary to draft appropriate provisions for any allocation of expenses including day care costs, non-covered medical expenses, extracurricular activities and the like. A related question is whether the child support custodian should use the child support funds to pay for expenses for the child
