About

A straight answer to one frustrating question

Most parents sit down during a divorce or custody mediation and realise nobody has told them their parenting time number. Parenting Time Calculator exists to give them that number in under a minute, without a paywall or an account.

Why we built it

Calculating overnights is grade-school division. (Overnights ÷ 365) × 100, that's the whole formula. But when you're mid-divorce, negotiating a parenting plan, or trying to figure out whether a proposed schedule crosses your state's shared-custody threshold, pulling out a calculator and a notebook feels clinical at best and overwhelming at worst.

The existing tools online were either hidden behind sign-up walls, bolted onto law firm websites as lead magnets, or wildly inaccurate about what the percentages actually mean. We got tired of sending family members screenshots of our own spreadsheets. So we put the spreadsheet on a web page and added the six most common schedules as one-click presets.

What the calculator actually does

It counts overnights, divides by 365, and multiplies by 100. If you pick a preset like every-other-weekend or 2-2-5-5, it fills in the baseline overnight count for you. If you have an unusual arrangement, you can enter your own number. Then you add any extra holiday days and summer weeks on top of the base schedule, and it gives you a final percentage that reflects a realistic year.

That number is the one courts use when they talk about parenting time. It's the number child support calculators in most states reference. It's what your attorney wants when they ask "what's the current split?" and what the other parent's attorney is going to be running the same math on before the next mediation session.

What it doesn't do

The calculator doesn't calculate child support. Support formulas are state-specific and pull in both incomes, health insurance premiums, daycare costs, and other variables that have nothing to do with a calendar. Knowing your parenting time percentage is step one of any child support estimate, not the whole answer.

It also doesn't give legal advice. Everything on this site is informational. The blog posts explain how custody schedules and child support generally work across U.S. states, but family law varies by jurisdiction, and anything with real financial or custody consequences needs a licensed family law attorney in your state. We're a math tool, not a lawyer.

Who reads this site

Most visitors are parents either going through a divorce, preparing for a custody modification, or trying to understand what an existing court order actually translates to in terms of real annual overnights. A smaller group are attorneys and mediators who send clients here as a quick reference before a meeting. A few are graduate students researching family law.

Whoever you are, the site is free. There's no account. We don't track you across the web. We don't sell your data, because we don't collect any. Poke around, run the numbers, read a guide, close the tab.

How the blog works

The guides section covers the questions visitors most commonly ask after running the calculator: what's the difference between 2-2-5-5 and 3-4-4-3, how do states like California and Texas handle parenting time in child support, how holidays affect the annual percentage, when courts will approve a modification. Each post is written to be useful on its own, not as an SEO shell around the calculator.

If you spot something wrong, or want to suggest a topic, the contact page is the fastest way to reach us. We read everything, and we've already fixed a handful of small errors that readers caught.

Neutral by design

One thing worth saying plainly: the calculator is neutral. It doesn't care which parent you are, what gender you are, or which way the split goes. Parent A and Parent B are interchangeable labels, not stand-ins for mother and father. Courts in every state apply a best-interests-of-the-child standard without gender presumptions, and the tool reflects that.

If you're using the site to work out a schedule with your co-parent, we hope it makes the conversation less awkward and more data-driven. That's the whole idea.