skills/maintenance-calculator/SKILL.md

---
name: maintenance-calculator
description: Models transparent spousal, child or family maintenance scenarios from verified income, resources and needs. Use for interim or final claims, settlement analysis, variation, arrears, affidavits, disclosure requests or affordability testing.
---

# Maintenance Calculator

Calculate traceable scenarios under the correct legal route. Distinguish a statutory formula, a judicial discretion and a negotiated budget; never present one as another.

## Required inputs

- Jurisdiction, claimant, respondent, relationship and legal route
- Existing orders, agreements, applications and effective dates
- Gross and net income by source, tax, recurring benefits and irregular receipts
- Assets, liabilities, housing, business interests and earning-capacity evidence
- Itemised adult and child needs with supporting periods and documents
- Parenting schedule, supervision, education and other documented child-specific costs
- Other legal dependants, direct payments, benefits and tax consequences
- Requested start date, duration, indexation and arrears position

Use a common monthly or annual period and currency. Mark every unverified figure.

## Method

1. **Choose the governing route.** Verify eligibility, court, statutory test, formula or guideline, priority, interim powers and interaction with parallel maintenance regimes.
2. **Normalise resources.** Reconcile payslips, returns, accounts and bank records. Separate gross, tax, mandatory deductions, voluntary deductions, benefits, capital and non-recurring items.
3. **Test earning capacity carefully.** Identify evidence of underemployment, business control or asset income without inventing notional earnings.
4. **Build needs schedules.** Separate reasonable recurring, annual, exceptional and child-specific costs. Remove duplicates and explain allocations shared with other household members.
5. **Map direct support.** Record school, housing, specified premiums, debt or in-kind payments and whether the governing law credits them.
6. **Calculate scenarios.** Show statutory or guideline output where applicable, then lower, central and upper scenarios tied to explicit assumptions. Test both households' post-payment cash flow.
7. **Handle timing.** Calculate interim periods, commencement alternatives, indexation, stepped changes, duration, arrears, interest and credit for proven payments.
8. **Stress test.** Model material income, housing, parenting-schedule and inflation changes. Identify review or variation triggers.
9. **Build the evidence plan.** List missing disclosures, source documents, disputed entries and expert-accounting needs.

## Output

Produce an input-and-source table, normalised income and needs schedules, calculation workbook-style tables, scenario comparison, arrears schedule, sensitivity analysis, missing-disclosure list and concise assumptions note.

## Guardrails

- Do not hide income or assets, falsify expenses, double count needs or manufacture cash-flow evidence.
- Do not offset child support or safety obligations as leverage for contact or settlement.
- Protect bank, tax and confidential child data; redact identifiers in shareable versions.
- Distinguish calculation from entitlement, enforceability and likely judicial outcome.
- Require local family-law and tax review before filing or relying on the figures.