Custody Schedule Examples

The main schedules side by side

Every row below is a two-week rotation, and every number is counted from that rotation, so you can check it against the grid on each schedule's own page. Parent A and parent B are placeholders; swap them to suit.

A year has 365 nights, so an exact 50/50 split is 182.5 each. In practice one parent has 182 and the other 183, or the odd night is swapped at a holiday.

How to choose between them

There is no best schedule, only the one that fits a particular child and two particular households. These are the questions that usually decide it:

• How old is the child? Very young children are often given shorter blocks and more frequent contact, and teenagers often care most about staying close to school and friends. Our guides to shared parenting for babies and toddlers and parenting a teenager after a separation cover the age-specific side.
• How far apart are the homes? A rotation with a midweek exchange assumes the child can get to school from both homes. Where the distance is long, fewer and longer blocks usually work better.
• How well do you handle exchanges? Every exchange is a moment where friction can start. If handovers are tense, a schedule with fewer of them, or exchanges that happen at school, takes pressure off. If conflict is deep, read about parallel parenting.
• What do your work hours look like? Shift work, travel and long commutes decide which nights a parent can realistically cover.
• How steady does the child need things to be? A rotation that repeats the same way each week is easier for a child to learn than one that changes between weeks.

For a longer look at the options, including how families think about it, read child living arrangements after separation and what researchers say about living in two homes.

How to count overnights

Parenting time is usually counted in nights, not days. Take the nights one parent has in a full rotation, divide by the length of the rotation, and multiply by 365 for the year. Two nights out of every 14 is 14.3%, about 52 nights a year; five out of 14 is 35.7%, about 130.

The count matters because some courts and child support formulas treat a minimum number of overnights as a threshold. The numbers, and what they change, differ from state to state and country to country, so check the rules where you live with a family lawyer or your court's self-help center before you choose a schedule for the arithmetic alone. Holidays and school breaks usually override the regular rotation, so the real yearly figure drifts a little from the textbook one.

A schedule is not the whole plan

The rotation covers ordinary weeks. A workable arrangement also says what happens on holidays, birthdays and school breaks, who handles transport, how a change is asked for and answered, and how the costs are shared. Writing those down once, in the same place as the calendar, is what stops the schedule from being renegotiated every month.

Using a schedule in the Co-parenting app

The app has templates for the common arrangements — alternating weeks, 2-2-3, 2-2-5-5, every other weekend and the rest — and you can build a custom schedule if yours does not look like any of them. Because a schedule is only a proposal until the other parent accepts it, you can put one together, see how it falls across the year, and change it before either of you has agreed to anything. After that, every change is a request the other parent has to accept. Read how the shared calendar works or the FAQ.

Frequently asked questions