How does the court address a payor who repeatedly changes jobs to avoid a stable income assessment?

A pattern of frequent job changes, particularly where each move coincides with a support review or otherwise seems timed to keep income difficult to pin down, is exactly the kind of conduct that leads courts to look past the payor's most recent pay stub and instead assess income based on a broader pattern across multiple years and positions. Rather than treating each new, lower-paying job as simply the current reality, a court can look at the parent's overall earning history, the reasons given for each change, and whether the pattern as a whole suggests a genuine career trajectory or a deliberate effort to frustrate an accurate income assessment.

Courts have discretion to average income over several years, or to impute income at a level consistent with the parent's demonstrated overall earning capacity, where a single year's figure would clearly misrepresent the parent's real financial picture. A payor with a credible, independent explanation for each job change, such as layoffs or genuine career progression, is in a very different position from one whose job history shows no clear pattern beyond consistently lower reported income. Because this kind of pattern can only be seen across time, gathering several years of employment and income history is usually necessary to make out this argument.