Massachusetts Alimony Guidelines

Massachusetts had a huge change in the alimony law in April 2012. Up until that point, Alimony was generally lifetime alimony. A payor spouse would have to pay alimony until their death or sometimes in an agreement it would say that alimony would terminate upon retirement but not always. Sometimes there was no end date. So what the new alimony law, that’s what it’s being called generically, is that it sets time limit for how long alimony is payable and that’s entirely dependent upon how long the parties have been married. There was a breakdown for 0-5 years, 5-10 years, 10-15 years and 15-20 years. What they take is the number of months you’ve been married and that the percentage starts at 60% and goes up from there of the number of months married that you have to pay alimony for. After 20 years, it can be an indefinite term and the caveat to all of this is that the judge looks at the ability of the party, who’s paying the alimony, to pay the alimony and the needs of the recipient party.

If the recipient party does not have the need for alimony for whatever reason, then alimony might not get paid but we’re talking a case, the more usual case, where someone’s been the breadwinner throughout the marriage and someone else has a lesser earning capacity and in that sense generally, the new alimony law would apply. The other part to the term and again, if you’ve been married longer, you have to pay a certain percentage based on the number of months you’ve been married so it varies with the length of the marriage. The length of the marriage is computed from the date of the marriage to the date the divorce is served. For instance, I recently had a case where they would just on the cusp of reaching the 20 year mark and we wanted to get them in the 15-20 year category so we had to get service done and we did get service done a week before the 20^th anniversary. The other thing to know with alimony is that, again, everything in this area is general but the way it’s computed now is that they take what’s known as the ‘disparity of incomes’. So they’ll take the payer spouse income.

Just for example say, the payer spouse makes $90,000 year and they’ll take the recipient spouse income and say the recipient spouse makes $10,000. If you subtract those two, you get $80,000 and then the alimony that’s paid annually would be between 30%-35% of that disparity. So the alimony paid to the recipient spouse would be 30%-35% of the $80,000. Those are the rules regarding the alimony and when alimony can be modified and when people who had lifetime alimony agreements can modify their alimony depends on whether or not they’ve agreed at the outsell when they got divorced that they had a surviving alimony caused which meant that is not modifiable because there are people trying to modify lifetime alimony agreements but they can’t because they agreed that it would be non-modifiable. The right to modify also depends on how long it’s been since your agreement was entered into because the alimony law is grandfathering those people and so they do have the right to come back to court if they have a merging alimony clause.