If you’re a dad in Colorado right now. fighting for custody, or already paying support while actually showing up for your kid. there’s a law you need to know about. It changed how child support gets calculated. And for the first time in a long time, the change actually helps you.
It’s called Colorado HB25-1159. Governor Polis signed it on May 31, 2025. It went into effect on March 1, 2026. If you have a support order being entered or modified right now. this week, this month. the new rules apply to you. The single biggest change: Colorado scrapped the old overnight threshold system and replaced it with a formula that counts every overnight you spend with your child. Starting from night one.
That’s bigger than it sounds. Let me walk you through why. and what the old system was actually doing to dads who were fighting to be present.
The Old Formula Was Built to Shut Fathers Out
The people who designed Colorado’s old child support formula probably didn’t sit down and say “let’s punish involved dads.” But intent doesn’t matter when the impact is real. And it was real for thousands of fathers across this state.
Colorado used two separate worksheets: Worksheet A and Worksheet B. Which one applied to you came down to one number. how many overnights you had per year.
If you had fewer than 93 overnights per year, you were on Worksheet A. Worksheet A gave you zero parenting time credit. Zero. Your overnights didn’t exist in the math. For context, 93 nights is about 25% of the year. one out of every four nights with your own kid.
Cross 93? You entered “shared physical care” territory and moved to Worksheet B, which actually factored both parents’ time into the calculation.
The 93-night cutoff was a cliff. One night below it and you fell off completely. A father with 92 overnights paid the exact same amount as a father with zero. The calculation could not tell those situations apart. It looked at that dad. buying groceries, doing homework, driving to practice, up at 2am when his kid had a fever. and said: none of it counts.
Think about who that actually hit hardest. Not men who had walked away from their kids. The dads who got buried by this were the ones fighting hardest to be there. Guys at every other weekend plus a Wednesday night. Guys at 20%, 22%, 24%. doing the actual work of parenting, just not enough of it yet to clear that arbitrary line.
And here’s where it got vicious in practice: the more time you spent with your kid, the more you were spending out of pocket on that child’s actual life. Food. Clothes. School supplies. A second bedroom. Copays. You were absorbing real costs every single month. And the formula told you those costs didn’t count until you hit 93 nights. You could show up for 85 nights and the support calculation would shrug like you weren’t a parent at all.
What That Cliff Felt Like in Real Life
When I was in the middle of my fight for Tanner, this wasn’t abstract to me. I was spending real money. money that eventually hit $250,000 over two years. just to be in my son’s life. Every dollar going out in child support under the old formula was a dollar I couldn’t put toward legal fees. Every dollar toward legal fees was a dollar I couldn’t save for Tanner’s future. The financial system and the custody system were working against each other at the same time, and if you had fewer than 93 overnights, you were caught right in the middle of that.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table at some point during the fight, staring at my attorney’s billing statements and a calculator, trying to figure out how I was going to keep going. I knew what I was paying in support each month. I knew how many nights I had with Tanner. And I knew those two numbers had nothing to do with each other. My seventy-something overnights were invisible to the calculation. I was being charged like I had zero involvement. That’s a specific kind of demoralizing that’s genuinely hard to describe if you haven’t been through it.
This isn’t some hypothetical scenario I’m constructing. Right now, there are dads in Colorado with 80 or 85 overnights with their kids. They’re doing the work. They’re there. They’re buying groceries on a Tuesday after school pickup, they’re up at 2am with a sick kid, they’re doing laundry and packing lunches and driving to every single practice. Under the old formula, their child support looked identical to a man who saw his kids for zero nights. No recognition. No credit. No signal from the system that what they were doing mattered financially.
The message built into that structure. intentional or not. was: you’re not really a parent until you clear our threshold. Everything below that line doesn’t count.
That message was wrong. And as of March 1, 2026, Colorado officially said so.
What HB25-1159 Actually Changes
The new law kills the Worksheet A / Worksheet B threshold entirely. Gone. In its place is a single graduated formula that applies to every overnight, from night one.
The bill language is plain about it: the new parenting time credit is “a formula that provides parents credit for all overnights spent with that parent.”
All overnights. Not “overnights above 93.” All of them.
But here’s something worth understanding about how the credit actually works. because I’ve seen posts that make it sound like a simple one-to-one ratio. Like 25% parenting time automatically equals a 25% reduction in your support. That’s not quite how it plays out, and if you walk into your attorney’s office expecting that, the numbers are going to confuse you.
The credit is graduated and intentionally weighted. Under the new formula:
- A father with 25% of parenting time (roughly 91 overnights per year) gets approximately a 13% credit against his obligation. not a full 25%
- A father with 50% of parenting time gets a 50% credit. that one is proportional
- The credit increases more aggressively as you approach equal time
The reason it’s not linear is that the majority-time parent still carries higher fixed costs. They need a larger home set up for the child, more furniture, a bigger everything for the child’s primary living environment. The new formula accounts for that reality while still giving minority-time parents real, meaningful credit for every overnight they have. That’s a reasonable tradeoff. and it’s a massive improvement over getting nothing at all.
For a dad at 25% who used to get zero credit, a 13% reduction in his monthly obligation is real money. Not everything, but not nothing. And it grows as your parenting time grows. Which means there’s now a direct financial connection between fighting for more time and seeing relief when you get it. Under the old formula, you could go from 50 nights to 92 nights and your check wouldn’t change by a single dollar. Now every night moves the needle.
How the New Math Should Change Your Custody Strategy
I want to be direct here, because this is something I wish I’d understood during my own fight.
Under the old system, there was a rational argument for the other side to make: getting you from, say, 70 nights to 85 nights wasn’t worth a major battle, because it didn’t change the child support calculation at all. You were still below the cliff. The financial stakes of those 15 extra nights were really zero on paper. That made it easier for opposing counsel to dig in against incremental parenting time gains. because the cost to their client was minimal.
Under the new formula, that argument is gone. Every overnight you gain now moves the calculation. Going from 70 nights to 85 nights changes your support obligation. Going from 85 to 91 changes it again. Every night has financial weight attached to it now. which means every incremental gain in your parenting schedule is worth fighting for in a way it simply wasn’t before. Not just for your relationship with your child, but in the financial math that often drives settlement negotiations.
If you’re in mediation, use this. If you’re negotiating a parenting plan, understand the dollar value of different schedule options. Have your attorney run the calculation under the new formula at multiple parenting time percentages. Know what your obligation looks like at 30%, at 40%, at 50%. Those numbers belong on the table when you negotiate. because they matter to both parties in a way they never did before.
This Law Is Already in Effect
Let me be direct about this because it’s the part people trip on.
HB25-1159 is not pending. It’s not “coming soon.” It became operative on March 1, 2026. If you’re reading this in March 2026 or later, this is already the law in Colorado.
But. and this matters. the new formula is not retroactive. It applies to child support orders that are entered or modified after March 1, 2026. The date that controls is when your order is issued or modified, not when you filed or when the divorce was finalized.
What that means practically:
- If you’re in active proceedings right now and your order hasn’t been finalized yet, the new formula applies to you.
- If you have an existing order calculated under the old formula, you’re not automatically getting the new calculation. You’d need to file for a modification.
- A modification isn’t guaranteed just because the law changed. Colorado courts generally require a showing of a substantial and continuing change in circumstances. Talk to a Colorado family law attorney about whether the change in support guidelines qualifies in your specific situation. but it’s absolutely worth asking.
The court isn’t going to reach out to you and say “hey, there’s a new law that might help you.” The system doesn’t work that way. It never has. You have to know this exists, bring it to your attorney, and take deliberate steps to use it. That’s the reality of being a father in family court. knowledge isn’t delivered to you. You have to find it and then fight to apply it.
The Other Changes in the Bill
The overnight threshold change gets the most attention, and it should. it’s the biggest shift for active fathers. But HB25-1159 made two other changes worth knowing about.
The extraordinary medical expense floor was eliminated. Under the old system, a child’s medical expenses only got factored into support if they exceeded $250 per child per year. That floor is gone. Medical expenses can now be considered starting at dollar one. If your child has ongoing medical needs. specialist visits, therapy, prescriptions, anything that adds up. this matters. Those costs now enter the calculation from the start rather than only after clearing the old threshold.
The income schedule was expanded. Colorado’s child support formula uses a combined monthly income schedule that caps the obligation once income hits a certain level. The old schedule topped out at $30,000 per month in combined parental income. The new schedule goes up to $40,000 per month. For most dads reading this, that expansion isn’t the most relevant piece. but if you’re in a higher-income case, it changes the math significantly, and it cuts both ways depending on who earns more.
Why This Matters If You’re Still in the Fight
If you’ve been fighting for more parenting time and you’re not there yet. maybe you’re sitting at 20% or 28% right now. the new formula means your current overnights have financial recognition they never had before. Under the old formula, anything under 93 nights was worth exactly zero in the calculation. Under the new one, those same nights generate a real credit.
That matters for reasons beyond the obvious monthly cash flow.
First, it changes the negotiation situation. When both parties know parenting time carries financial weight at every level, additional overnights become more meaningful to both sides of the table. That can actually work in your favor when you’re negotiating a parenting plan.
Second, it reduces the double bind. A lot of fathers got stuck in a feedback loop. not enough overnights meant no credit, which meant higher support payments, which meant less capacity to keep fighting for more time, which meant fewer overnights. The new formula doesn’t break that loop entirely. The fight is still expensive, the system is still slow. But it loosens it. Every overnight you fight for now immediately moves the financial calculation in your favor.
Third. and this is for the guys at 85 or 90 overnights, just under where the old threshold would have kicked in. the new formula gives you meaningful credit right now without having to push all the way to 93 first. You don’t have to cross a line to matter anymore. Every night you already have counts.
The Part That Has Nothing to Do With Money
I want to step back from the legal mechanics for a second, because the financial math sometimes drowns out what the actual fight is about.
Every overnight your child spends with you is a night of real parenting. Breakfast the next morning. Homework after dinner. Being there when they can’t sleep or had a bad dream. Teaching them how to handle something hard. Building the kind of relationship that only comes from being present in the boring, ordinary, unglamorous moments. not just the weekend highlight reel.
My son Tanner means everything to me. The fight I went through. $250,000, two years, more stress than I have words for. wasn’t about winning a legal argument. It was about being in his life in a real way. About him knowing his dad showed up. Not in a scheduled, supervised, every-other-weekend way. Actually there.
The old child support formula, by drawing that 93-night line, was telling fathers below it that they were supplemental parents. That their involvement didn’t rise to a level worth recognizing financially. And the signal that sent. across years, across thousands of cases. was that fathers under the threshold were second-tier. Not quite real parents in the eyes of the calculation.
A lot of dads don’t get 50/50 on the first ruling. They get 20% and they’re supposed to build from there. The old formula made that harder by refusing to count the time they already had. You were supposed to earn your way to relevance before the math would acknowledge you existed as a parent at all.
Eliminating the 93-night cliff doesn’t fix the family court system. The bias is still real. The financial toll on fathers is still crushing. The damage done to kids who lose meaningful time with their dads is still happening in Colorado courtrooms every week. But this particular change. giving credit for every overnight. is the right call. It recognizes that a father at 20% is still a father. That his nights with his kid still count. That involvement doesn’t need to clear a bureaucratic threshold before the system treats it as real.
What to Bring to Your Attorney
If you want a productive conversation with a Colorado family law attorney about how HB25-1159 applies to your situation, come prepared. Attorney time isn’t cheap, so don’t waste it getting oriented on basics you can figure out yourself beforehand.
Here’s what to bring and what to ask:
- Your current parenting schedule in actual nights per year. not “every other weekend.” Count them. The difference between 85 nights and 93 nights matters under both the old and new formula, and your attorney needs the real number, not an approximation.
- Your current child support order with the calculation worksheet attached. you want to see which worksheet was applied and what inputs were used, so you can compare against what the new formula would produce.
- Both parties’ current income information. child support runs on combined gross incomes. If either income has changed significantly since the last order, that’s relevant to any modification.
- Your child’s medical expense history. relevant now that the $250 floor is gone. If your child has recurring medical costs, bring documentation of what you’ve paid in the last 12 months.
- Your original divorce decree or parenting plan. so your attorney can confirm whether a modification requires a showing of changed circumstances or whether there’s a built-in review mechanism in your order.
Ask your attorney directly: “Under the new overnight credit formula in HB25-1159, what would my child support obligation look like with my current parenting schedule?” Then ask: “What would it look like at 50/50?” That second number matters because it quantifies. in real dollars. what you’re fighting toward. It makes the case for more parenting time concrete. Not just emotionally, but financially. Both numbers belong in your picture of the case.
If you have an existing order and want to explore modification, ask to be specific: “Does the change in support guidelines give me grounds to request a modification?” The answer depends on your specific order, your jurisdiction within Colorado, and your judge’s history with this. But ask it explicitly. Nobody in the system is going to volunteer that information. They never have.
What to Do Right Now
If you’re in Colorado and any of the following apply, bring HB25-1159 up with your attorney now:
- You’re in active custody or child support proceedings
- You have an existing child support order calculated under the old 93-night threshold formula
- You have fewer than 93 overnights and are currently paying support
- You’re about to enter mediation or a modification hearing
- You’re negotiating a parenting plan and want to understand the financial implications of different schedules
Ask to be specific about HB25-1159 and the new parenting time overnight credit formula. Ask when it applies to your case. Ask whether your existing order can be modified. Ask what your support obligation would look like at your current parenting time versus 50/50. Get specific numbers in front of you and on paper before you make any decisions.
This is not a situation where you wait and hope the court applies the new rules automatically. You have to know the law, ask the right questions, and advocate for yourself. That’s just the reality of how this system works for fathers. Nobody hands you anything. You have to go get it.
I know how exhausting that is. I know what it feels like to be in year two of a custody fight, watching your savings disappear and wondering if the system is ever going to see you clearly. I know the particular kind of anger that comes from paying support on a calculation that doesn’t reflect the time you actually put in. that treats 85 nights of active parenting like they never happened. This law doesn’t fix all of that. But it is a real change, passed by a real legislature, signed by a real governor, and in effect right now. That matters. Use it.
If you’re earlier in the fight and haven’t read about how these custody battles actually unfold. the finances, the strategy, the psychological toll. here’s my account of how I spent $250,000 over two years fighting for 50/50 custody of Tanner. It’s not a feel-good story. But it’s an honest one, and some of the hard lessons in it might save you money and time.
The Bottom Line
Colorado HB25-1159 was signed May 31, 2025 and became operative on March 1, 2026. It’s in effect right now. The law eliminates the old 93-overnight threshold entirely and replaces it with a graduated formula that gives you credit for every overnight you spend with your child. from the very first one.
The credit isn’t perfectly linear. At 25% parenting time you get roughly a 13% credit. At 50/50 you get a full 50% credit. But every overnight moves the number. None of them are invisible in the calculation anymore.
The law is not retroactive. If you have an existing order, you need to take affirmative steps. most likely a modification filing. to get the new formula applied. It won’t happen automatically. The system will not reach out to you. You have to bring it.
Talk to a Colorado family law attorney. Ask to be specific about HB25-1159 and what the new parenting time credit formula means for your situation. Don’t guess. Don’t assume your order already reflects the new formula without getting that confirmed by legal counsel in writing.
The fight is still hard. The system is still slow. But this is a concrete, legally-enacted real progress for fathers in Colorado who are showing up for their kids. You deserve to know it exists. Now you do.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The author is not an attorney. Laws vary by jurisdiction and individual circumstances. Consult a qualified family law attorney in Colorado for advice specific to your situation. Source: Colorado HB25-1159, signed May 31, 2025 (Chapter 334), effective March 1, 2026. Full bill text available at leg.colorado.gov.