Glossary
Income cap
A ceiling on how much of the payor's income a support formula applies to. Income above it is left to the court's discretion rather than run through the formula.
A guideline formula that applied to unlimited income would produce implausible figures at high incomes, so states that publish one usually stop applying it past a threshold. New York's post-divorce maintenance guideline applies to the payor's income up to a cap the Unified Court System republishes every two years; above that the court decides on the statutory factors. Two details are easy to get wrong. The cap applies to the payor's income only — New York's own form defines combined income as the payor's income up to the cap plus the payee's income uncapped, and capping the payee too would understate the award. And the operative figure lives in a court publication rather than in the statute, which prints the base amount the biennial adjustment starts from. A page quoting the statutory base is quoting a number that was superseded, not one that was ever wrong. Illinois handles the same problem differently: rather than capping income, it switches its guideline off entirely once combined gross income reaches $500,000.