Is the Texas OAG child support calculator accurate? Its net-resources cap is out of date.

This post explains how the Texas child support guideline computes a number. It is not legal advice, and it does not tell you what a court will order in your case. Texas judges retain discretion under Tex. Fam. Code §154.123 to vary from the guideline on stated findings, and the facts that drive a real order, income characterization, medical support, multiple households, enforcement history, are case-specific. Talk to a Texas family lawyer about your situation. What follows is arithmetic and statute, which is a different thing from advice.

With that said: the Office of the Attorney General’s online child support calculator currently applies a cap on monthly net resources of $9,200. That figure was superseded on September 1, 2025, when the statutory cap became $11,700. We verified the calculator’s value directly while writing this post.

For most cases this makes no difference at all. For cases at or above the cap, it changes the guideline figure. This post explains which is which, and shows the arithmetic either way.

The short version

• The statutory cap on monthly net resources is $11,700, effective 2025-09-01, under Tex. Fam. Code §154.125(a) as adjusted through the §154.125(a-1) review cycle.
• The OAG’s public calculator still applies $9,200, the cap set on 2019-09-01 and superseded almost a year ago. We verified this directly against the live tool on 2026-07-30 at 17:10 UTC: the page ships a JavaScript constant, let $cap = 9200.
• For anyone at or above the cap, the divergence is $500 per month for one child ($6,000 a year), $625 for two, $750 for three. The OAG tool understates in every one of those cases.
• This is an outdated constant, not a formula error. Everything else the tool does with the percentages appears to track §154.125; the cap value is the part that has not been updated.
• A second divergence is unrelated to the cap: “net resources” under §154.062(d) is not take-home pay, and both calculators apply that definition the same way. It is covered below because it accounts for most of the confusion about Texas support figures.

If you only needed the operational answer: verify any number you got from the OAG calculator against the current cap before you rely on it in a negotiation, and understand that the guideline output is a starting presumption, not the order.

What the cap actually does

Texas does not use an income-shares model. California computes a single guideline figure from both parents’ incomes and the custody timeshare percentage; Texas does something structurally different and considerably simpler to state. Under §154.125, the guideline applies a flat percentage to the obligor’s monthly net resources, stepped by the number of children before the court:

Children before the court	Guideline percentage of net resources
1	20%
2	25%
3	30%
4	35%
5	40%

The cap is what makes this bounded. §154.125(a) applies those percentages only to net resources up to a ceiling. Above the ceiling, the guideline percentage stops applying to the excess. A parent with $9,000 a month in net resources and one child is inside the cap and the math is simply 20% of $9,000. A parent with $40,000 a month is far above it, and the guideline figure is 20% of the capped amount, not 20% of $40,000.

That ceiling is not fixed in the statute’s text forever. §154.125(a-1) directs the Title IV-D agency, the OAG, to review the amount every six years against the consumer price index and publish the adjusted figure in the Texas Register before it takes effect. The history is short and easy to check:

• 2013-09-01, $8,550, the first cap under the review mechanism
• 2019-09-01, $9,200, the first six-year adjustment
• 2025-09-01, $11,700, the second, announced 2025-08-15

The 2025 adjustment was large, about 27%, because it absorbed six years of CPI-U in a single step. That size is exactly why the staleness matters. A tool lagging by one small adjustment produces a rounding-error difference. A tool lagging across a 27% step produces a materially wrong number for every high-earner case it touches.

The arithmetic of the divergence

Here is the computation the two caps produce, holding everything else identical. Assume an obligor whose monthly net resources are at or above $11,700: a high earner, but not an extreme one; this is a household in the low-to-mid six figures gross.

One child, 20%:

• Against the current statutory cap: 20% × $11,700 = $2,340 per month
• Against the OAG tool’s stale cap: 20% × $9,200 = $1,840 per month
• Difference: $500 per month, or $6,000 per year

Two children, 25%:

• Statute: 25% × $11,700 = $2,925
• OAG tool: 25% × $9,200 = $2,300
• Difference: $625 per month, $7,500 per year

Three children, 30%:

• Statute: 30% × $11,700 = $3,510
• OAG tool: 30% × $9,200 = $2,760
• Difference: $750 per month, $9,000 per year

A few things worth being precise about, because this is the part people get wrong when they repeat it.

The divergence only appears at or above the cap. If the obligor’s net resources are $6,000 a month, both calculators return 20% of $6,000 for one child, and they agree exactly. The stale constant is invisible for the majority of cases, which is very likely why it has survived eleven months without being caught. It only bites the cases where the most money is at stake.

Above the cap, the divergence is flat, not proportional. Whether net resources are $11,700 or $117,000, the one-child understatement is the same $500 a month, because both calculations are pinned to their respective ceilings. The gap does not widen with income.

This understates the guideline figure, in the obligor’s favor. An obligee relying on the OAG number as a settlement anchor for a high-earner case is anchoring low by up to $9,000 a year.

Why the official tool goes stale

It is worth being precise about the mechanism here, because “the state’s calculator is wrong” implies more intent than the facts support.

The cap is not hardcoded in the statute in a way that a code update automatically propagates. §154.125(a-1) creates an administrative cycle: the OAG computes the CPI-U adjustment, publishes it in the Texas Register, and the new figure takes effect the following September 1. The statute changes by publication. The calculator changes only if someone updates the calculator.

Those are two different workstreams inside the same agency, and the second one is a web application with a constant embedded in its client-side JavaScript. The 2019 adjustment presumably required the same manual edit. Six years is long enough for the person who knew to do it to have moved on.

This is an ordinary software-maintenance failure of a kind familiar to anyone who has run production systems: a value that changes on a six-year cycle is precisely the value nobody builds a process around, because the interval is longer than most people’s tenure in the role.

We say this as builders rather than critics. It is also why we treat our own cap as data rather than as code. Our Texas engine stores the full cap history as dated entries, so a computation is always performed against the cap in effect on the date that matters, and a 2031 adjustment is a data change rather than a code change. We also run an automated daily probe against the OAG tool that extracts its published cap and flags divergence, which is how we can state the $9,200 figure with a timestamp instead of an impression.

A second divergence: net resources is not net income

The cap is the narrow, checkable discrepancy. There is a second gap that is definitional rather than a maintenance lapse, and it affects every Texas case rather than only those above the cap. Both calculators handle it the same way, correctly, but it is where most of the confusion about Texas support numbers actually comes from.

“Net resources” under §154.062 is a statutory construct. It is not your take-home pay. §154.062(d) enumerates what comes out of gross to get there, and the list is much shorter than the list of things actually deducted from a paycheck:

• Social Security taxes, or the self-employment equivalent
• Federal income tax, computed under a specific presumption discussed below
• State income tax, where applicable, for Texas residents, zero
• Union dues
• The child’s health insurance and dental premiums, plus certain cash medical support

Read what is absent. 401(k) and other retirement contributions are not deducted. Neither are car payments, mortgage payments, credit-card obligations, wage garnishments for other debts, or the ordinary cost of living. A parent contributing 15% of salary to retirement has a take-home number substantially below their net resources, and the guideline runs on the larger figure.

This is the single most common source of “the calculator says I owe more than I can afford.” The calculator is not malfunctioning. It is computing a statutory quantity that was never intended to equal disposable income.

The single-filer presumption

There is one more piece of §154.062(d) that deserves its own paragraph, because it is genuinely counterintuitive and it drives the arithmetic more than most people expect.

§154.062(d)(2) requires deduction of federal income tax “based on the tax rate for a single person claiming one personal exemption and the standard deduction.”

That is a statutory presumption, not a description of the obligor. It applies regardless of actual filing status. A married obligor filing jointly with three dependents still has net resources computed as though they were a single filer taking the standard deduction. The statute fixes the assumption so the computation is uniform and administrable across cases; the cost is that it systematically diverges from anyone’s real tax liability.

The presumption also has an odd historical artifact embedded in it. It refers to “one personal exemption,” and after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act the personal exemption’s value is zero. IRC §151(d)(5) reduced it to nothing. The statutory language still says what it says. The reconciliation in practice is the OAG’s annually republished tax charts, which express the presumption as concrete numbers each year. Our engine matches the same constants and derives from the same published methodology, which is why our federal-tax deduction agrees with the OAG tax charts even where our cap does not agree with the OAG calculator.

What to actually do with this

If you have a number from the OAG calculator and the case involves net resources near or above $9,200 a month, the number is worth re-deriving. The check is arithmetic you can do yourself: identify the obligor’s monthly net resources under §154.062(d), cap the figure at $11,700, and apply the §154.125 percentage for the number of children before the court.

If you are working with counsel, the statute and the Texas Register publication are the citations that matter, not any calculator’s output, ours included. No calculator is authority in a Texas courtroom. §154.125 is authority. A calculator is a tool for arriving at the number the statute describes, and its value is entirely a function of whether it implements the statute correctly on the day you use it.

That is the reason we publish our methodology, cite the section behind every step, and show the arithmetic rather than only the result, so the figure can be checked against the statute rather than taken on trust.

You can run the computation with our Texas child support calculator, which applies the current $11,700 cap, shows each §154.062(d) deduction as a separate line, and cites the controlling subsection at every step. Where our figure and the OAG’s diverge, we show both and explain the reason rather than quietly picking one.

Primary sources

Everything above is checkable against primary sources, and we would rather you check it than take our word:

• Tex. Fam. Code Chapter 154: the controlling chapter, at statutes.capitol.texas.gov. §154.062 defines net resources, §154.125 sets the percentages and the cap, §154.125(a-1) creates the six-year review cycle, and §154.126 governs the above-cap analysis.
• The OAG’s calculator and tax charts at csapps.oag.texas.gov. The cap constant is visible in the page source. The tax charts are the operative expression of the §154.062(d)(2) presumption.
• The Texas Register publication of the 2025-08-15 cap adjustment, which is what made $11,700 effective on 2025-09-01.

Cap divergence verified against the live OAG calculator on 2026-07-30 at 17:10 UTC. Statutes current as of 2026-07-30. If the OAG updates its tool, we will update this post and say so, our daily probe exists precisely so that we notice.