Building a Step-Down Support Plan After a Common-Law Split

The situation

Kostas and Amrit had lived together for eleven years without marrying. Kostas worked as an electrician, steady but seasonal, earning around $95,000 a year once overtime was counted in. Amrit had trained as a plumber early in the relationship and, over time, built a income closer to $135,000 a year running a small residential service route. They bought a semi-detached home in North York nine years ago, carried a mortgage together, and had two children, Navdeep and her younger brother, now nine and seven.

When the relationship ended, Kostas came to Treadstone Law with a narrow question: did living together without marrying change what he was owed. He had heard, secondhand and inaccurately, that common-law partners in Ontario have no rights at all. That is only half true, and the half that is wrong mattered a great deal to his situation.

The legal problem

Ontario's property law splits sharply along the marriage line. Under the Family Law Act, only married spouses are entitled to an equal division of the value built up during the relationship — a process called equalization. Common-law partners, no matter how long they have lived together, do not get equalization. Each keeps what is in their own name, subject to arguments about trusts or joint contributions that are far harder to prove and far more expensive to litigate than a straightforward equalization claim.

Support is a different story. The Family Law Act's support provisions extend to common-law partners who have lived together for a set minimum period or who have a child together, as Kostas and Amrit did. That meant Kostas could pursue both child support and spousal support even though he had no claim to a share of the house itself, which stayed registered in both their names as tenants in common and would need to be dealt with separately as an ordinary property matter, not a family law equalization.

The harder question was entitlement to spousal support and, if entitled, how much and for how long. Kostas had taken on more of the parenting and school-run logistics over the years, which had capped his overtime hours and slowed his progression toward higher-paying commercial contracts. Amrit, meanwhile, had grown the plumbing business steadily during the same years. There was a real argument that the relationship pattern had shaped Kostas's lower earning trajectory — the kind of argument that supports entitlement to compensatory spousal support, not simply support based on need.

The risk on the other side was equally real. Amrit's income, while higher, was self-employment income that varied year to year and carried business expenses that reduced what was actually available for support. An open-ended, indefinite support order calculated on a single strong year would have been vulnerable to a variation application the moment a slower year arrived — and would have left both of them paying legal fees to fight about it repeatedly over the following decade.

What we did

1. Confirmed entitlement before talking about numbers. Before any figure was proposed, we set out in writing why Kostas had a compensatory basis for support — the years of reduced overtime and slower career progression tied directly to the division of parenting labour during the relationship — separately from any argument based on need alone. Establishing entitlement first meant the negotiation with Amrit's counsel started from a shared premise rather than reopening the basic question at every exchange.
2. Used the Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines as a starting range, not a rulebook. These guidelines are a widely used, non-binding tool that produces a range for both the amount and the duration of support based on the length of the relationship and the income gap between partners. We ran Kostas and Amrit's numbers through that framework to establish a defensible range, then adjusted from it to reflect the children's ages, Amrit's variable self-employment income, and the specific compensatory story behind Kostas's lower earnings.
3. Proposed a step-down structure instead of a flat monthly figure. Rather than one number running indefinitely, we built a five-year schedule: a higher monthly amount for the first two years while the children were still young and Kostas's work hours remained constrained, stepping down at year three as the youngest child started full-day school and Kostas's overtime capacity opened back up, and stepping down again at year five toward a modest, time-limited final phase. Each step was tied to a calendar date, not to a future negotiation, so neither party had to return to the table to trigger it.
4. Built in a income-averaging clause for the payor's variable earnings. Because Amrit's plumbing income moved up and down year to year, we proposed calculating the support base on a three-year rolling average of Amrit's total reported income rather than a single year's figure. That protected Amrit from a support level pegged to one unusually strong year, while protecting Kostas from a payor who could simply have a quiet year on paper the moment support was due for review.
5. Addressed the house as a separate, ordinary property matter. Because equalization did not apply, we treated the North York home on its own footing: a buyout of Amrit's interest by Kostas, financed through refinancing the existing mortgage, with the value split according to what each had actually paid toward the down payment and principal over nine years — tracked from bank records rather than assumed to be equal. Keeping the property discussion separate from the support discussion stopped the two issues from being traded against each other in ways that would have made either one harder to defend later.
6. Documented pension credits and future review rights. Both had workplace pension entitlements accrued during the relationship. Because common-law partners have no automatic pension-splitting right on separation the way married spouses do, we recorded each partner's estimated pension value as of the separation date in the agreement itself, so that if either later wanted to negotiate a voluntary adjustment, there would be a clear, dated benchmark to work from rather than a dispute about historical account statements years down the line.

The outcome

The step-down structure resolved the file without a court application. Amrit's counsel had initially proposed a flat, lower monthly amount running for three years only, on the basis that common-law partners generally receive shorter support periods than married spouses of similar duration. Once we set out the compensatory entitlement argument and the guideline range in writing, that position moved substantially — the final agreement ran five years rather than three, with the first two years set close to the top of the calculated range in recognition of the ongoing constraint on Kostas's work hours while the children were young.

The agreement was signed roughly four months after Kostas's first meeting with us, entirely through negotiation between the two sets of counsel. Kostas refinanced the mortgage to buy out Amrit's share of the house within the same window, using the documented contribution split rather than an assumed even division, which left Amrit with a fair return on the down payment originally put toward the property. Both pension values were recorded in the agreement as a future reference point, resolving nothing immediately but avoiding a harder argument later if either wanted to revisit it.

Five years from signing, the support obligation will end on its own under the terms of the agreement, without either party needing to go back to court or renegotiate. Because the step-downs were tied to dates rather than to a future agreement between two people who might, by then, be back on difficult terms, the plan is designed to run itself.

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