Practice areas · Frankfurt am Main
Maintenance and child support in Germany
Who pays what, and for how long, is where separations turn tense. German maintenance law follows its own logic — claim early, and expect self-responsibility rather than lifelong support. Here is how it fits together, before the numbers.
Four things to know before the figures
Claim early — it rarely backdates
Maintenance generally runs only from the moment you ask for it or request disclosure (§ 1613 BGB). Wait, and you give away months for nothing.
Two kinds, two sets of rules
Maintenance during separation (Trennungsunterhalt) and maintenance after divorce (nachehelicher Unterhalt) are separate — one does not roll into the other.
Support after divorce is the exception
German law starts from self-responsibility. Post-marital maintenance needs a legal ground and is usually limited in time — not a lifelong entitlement.
Child support follows a table
The amount comes from the Düsseldorf table — the payer’s net income and the child’s age — on top of a statutory minimum (§ 1612a BGB).
The one thing to do straight away
Maintenance rarely reaches back in time. As a rule it is owed only from the point you ask for it — or formally ask the other side to disclose their income (§ 1613 BGB). The months before that request are usually lost for good.
So the practical first step, even before the figures are clear, is to put the other spouse on notice: state that you are claiming maintenance and ask them to set out their income. It is a short letter, but it starts the clock and protects what you are owed. Waiting to “sort it out later” is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.
Maintenance while you are separated
From the day you live apart until the divorce is final, the spouse with the lower income can be entitled to separation maintenance (Trennungsunterhalt, § 1361 BGB). It exists to hold the standard of living the marriage had while things are still in flux, and the bar for expecting the receiving spouse to earn their own living is lower here than it will be after divorce.
This is also where the separation year and maintenance meet: the clock on the divorce and the entitlement to separation maintenance both start when you separate. If you want the wider picture of the timeline, see our guide to the separation year.
Maintenance after divorce — the exception, not the rule
This is where expectations brought from abroad most often go wrong. German law begins from self-responsibility: after divorce, each spouse is expected to provide for themselves (§ 1569 BGB). Post-marital maintenance (nachehelicher Unterhalt) is the exception, and it has to rest on a defined ground — caring for a young child, age, illness, unemployment despite genuine effort, or a shortfall while retraining (§§ 1570 ff. BGB).
And even where a ground applies, the support is usually limited in time or amount. A court measures it against the disadvantages the marriage actually created — a career given up to raise children, for instance — rather than the standard of living alone (§ 1578b BGB). A long marriage with children is weighed very differently from a short one, but open-ended, lifelong maintenance is no longer the starting assumption it once was.
Child support — two parents, two ways of paying
Both parents owe child support, but they usually provide it in different ways. The parent the child mainly lives with contributes through daily care; the other parent pays in money. The amount comes from the Düsseldorf table, graded by that parent’s net income and the child’s age, resting on the statutory minimum maintenance (§ 1612a BGB).
When income does not stretch to every claim at once, the law sets an order: minor children come first, ahead of a spouse or ex-spouse (§ 1609 BGB). Child support is also the one strand that can never be signed away or traded — it belongs to the child, whatever the parents agree between themselves.
How the amount is actually worked out
Maintenance is not a percentage plucked from the air. It starts from income properly worked out — net earnings, adjusted for certain fixed costs and debts — and each side has a duty to disclose it honestly (§ 1605 BGB). Where someone is self-employed or paid in bonuses, establishing the real figure is half the work, and where it is done loosely the result is simply wrong.
Against that income sits a protected minimum the paying spouse always keeps for their own living (the Selbstbehalt). Maintenance is what the guidelines produce between those two points. If a business, variable pay or assets abroad are in the picture, the income question gets more involved — the ground we cover on our high-asset divorce page.
Common questions
From when is maintenance owed — can I claim it for the past?
What is the difference between separation and post-marital maintenance?
How much is child support?
Will I really pay — or receive — maintenance for the rest of my life?
Does it matter who caused the break-up?
I live or work abroad — can maintenance still be claimed?
Maintenance is rarely settled on its own — it moves with custody, the divorce and, for many couples, income in more than one country. If you are looking for an English-speaking divorce lawyer in Frankfurt, that is what this office does. You may also want our page on child custody.
Contact
Get the maintenance question right, early
A confidential initial consultation, in English — what you can claim or expect to pay, and the sensible next step. We reply personally, usually within one business day.
Sources
- Governing statutes (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB): § 1361 (separation maintenance), §§ 1569–1573 and § 1575 (post-marital maintenance and its grounds), § 1578b (limitation in time and amount), § 1605 (duty to disclose income), § 1609 (order of priority), § 1612a (minimum child support), § 1613 (claiming for the past) — gesetze-im-internet.de.
- The Düsseldorf table (Düsseldorfer Tabelle), published by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, sets the guideline figures for child support — olg-duesseldorf.nrw.de.