Why Equal Parenting Time Did Not Mean Equal Child Support

The situation

Deepa and Vikram had lived together in Innisfil for close to eight years without marrying. They had one daughter together, Lucia, then eight years old, and by early 2026 had decided to separate on reasonably good terms. Both wanted to avoid a drawn-out legal process. They agreed on a parenting schedule that split Lucia's week almost exactly down the middle, and they used a free online template to draft a separation agreement covering parenting time, property, and support.

Deepa worked as a software developer earning roughly $102,000 a year. Vikram worked as a pharmacist earning roughly $118,000. Between salary, a shared home with meaningful equity, and some investment accounts, their household finances were solidly upper-middle income, but neither had been through a separation before, and neither had a background in family law. The template they used included a line for child support. They filled it in with a dollar figure of zero, on the reasoning that since Lucia would split her time evenly between two homes, each parent would simply cover her costs while she was with them, and nothing further needed to change hands.

Before either of them signed anything, Deepa contacted Treadstone Law for independent legal advice — a step her template's instructions recommended, and one that matters more than most people realize when a separation agreement is being prepared without a lawyer involved from the start.

What the review found

The assumption behind the draft agreement is one of the most common misunderstandings in Ontario family law: that equal parenting time cancels out child support. It does not, and the reasoning behind why matters for anyone negotiating their own arrangement.

Child support in Ontario does not run through a single statute. Divorcing parents' child support runs through the Federal Child Support Guidelines. Deepa and Vikram were never married, so Vikram's support obligation to Lucia was set instead under Ontario's own child support guidelines — a separate piece of legislation, but one built on the same support tables as the federal version. Because the two sets of guidelines are aligned, the dollar figures come out identical either way; only the law they come from changes. In practical terms, Vikram's obligation to Lucia was exactly what it would have been had he and Deepa been married.

Under the Guidelines, when a child spends at least roughly 40 percent of the time with each parent, support is not simply waived — and it is not settled by a straight set-off either. The set-off is where the calculation starts, not where it ends. Each parent's notional support obligation is worked out separately, using the standard support tables based on their own income and the number of children, as though each parent were the one paying full support. Those two table amounts are then set off against each other — the lower subtracted from the higher — to produce a starting figure. From there, the court weighs the increased cost of running two households and each parent's means, needs and circumstances, so the final amount can match that starting figure or land above or below it, and expenses like childcare, medical costs and activities are shared on top of whatever the final figure comes to.

Applying that approach to Deepa and Vikram's incomes, the table amount for one child came out to roughly $1,050 a month based on Vikram's income, and roughly $920 a month based on Deepa's. The set-off starting figure was about $130 a month, payable from Vikram to Deepa, and nothing about their household costs or circumstances pointed toward adjusting it up or down, so $130 a month held as the final figure. It was not a large figure relative to their household income, but it was real money that the draft agreement, as written, would have left on the table indefinitely. Over the roughly ten years remaining until Lucia's eighteenth birthday, that gap added up to somewhere in the neighbourhood of $15,000.

The draft also handled Lucia's extracurricular activities and eventual orthodontic costs by splitting them 50/50, which sounded fair but was not quite right either. Special and extraordinary expenses of that kind are generally shared between parents in proportion to their incomes, not equally. Based on Deepa and Vikram's respective earnings, the proportionate split worked out closer to 46 percent for Deepa and 54 percent for Vikram — a modest difference on any single expense, but one that would have quietly shifted more of Lucia's costs onto Deepa, the lower earner, over years of soccer registrations, braces, and school trips.

What we did

1. Confirmed the parenting schedule actually met the shared-time threshold. The set-off calculation only starts once a child spends close to 40 percent or more of the time with each parent, so a schedule that looked like 50/50 on paper needed to be checked, not assumed. We reviewed the proposed calendar week by week rather than taking the round number 'fifty-fifty' at face value, since real schedules drift once school terms, work travel, and holiday weeks are accounted for, and a schedule that quietly fell to 35 percent would have taken the arrangement out of set-off territory and put Deepa on the standard table amount instead. The calendar held up, and we confirmed the arrangement genuinely qualified.
2. Recalculated support using the full set-off analysis. We ran the table amounts for both incomes independently under Ontario's own Child Support Guidelines — which mirror the Federal Guidelines' tables for parents who were never married — set them off against each other as a starting figure, and then weighed that figure against the added cost of running two households and each parent's means and circumstances before confirming the roughly $130 monthly amount owed from Vikram to Deepa was the right final number, not just a convenient starting point. We explained in plain terms why a $0 figure in the draft did not reflect what the Guidelines actually require, and why the set-off starting point is not something the parents could simply agree away by mutual consent without a court later questioning the agreement's fairness to Lucia.
3. Corrected the special expenses clause to a proportionate split. We revised the clause covering extracurricular activities, orthodontics, and similar costs so that each parent's share tracked their income proportion rather than a flat 50/50 division, since an equal split would have quietly shifted more of Lucia's costs onto Deepa, the lower earner, every time an expense came up. We also recommended a mechanism for recalculating that proportion if either parent's income changed materially in future years, so the clause would not go stale the way the original draft already had.
4. Prepared a written summary of the issues for Deepa to bring back to Vikram. Because Vikram was not our client and had not had his own legal advice, we did not negotiate with him directly. Instead we gave Deepa a clear, non-adversarial explanation of the set-off calculation and the proportionate expense-sharing rule that she could share with him, along with the reasoning, so the correction could be made collaboratively rather than as a dispute.
5. Reviewed the final agreement before signing. Once Vikram had a chance to consider the correction — and, we later learned, had briefly sought his own advice on it — the couple returned an updated draft. We reviewed the final version to confirm the support and expense clauses matched the Guidelines calculation, along with the property and parenting terms, before advising Deepa she could sign.

The outcome

Vikram accepted the correction without significant pushback once the calculation was explained to him. The couple's finalized separation agreement included the roughly $130 monthly set-off payment and the proportionate, income-based approach to Lucia's special expenses, reviewable if either parent's income changed by a meaningful amount. Both signed with independent legal advice on record, which strengthens an agreement's standing if either party later tried to argue they had not understood what they were agreeing to.

Nothing about this case involved a court appearance, a dispute that needed resolving after the fact, or a parent discovering years later that their agreement had shorted their child. The error was caught on paper, before signatures, while it was still a five-minute conversation instead of a legal problem. That is the version of this story that plays out far less often than it should — most people who use a template on their own have no way of knowing that 'equal time' is not the same thing as 'equal cost,' and many separation agreements with exactly this error get signed and simply never revisited.

For Deepa and Vikram, the practical effect was straightforward: roughly $130 a month moving from Vikram to Deepa, and Lucia's future extracurricular and medical costs split closer to 46/54 than 50/50. Small numbers on their own, but multiplied across a decade of parenting a child together, they represented a meaningful and entirely avoidable gap that a properly reviewed agreement closed before it ever opened.

What you can learn from this