Texas Family Law Guides

A Texas family case ends in a stack of orders, not a single ruling. One order says which parent holds which rights over a child. Another sets the calendar. A third sets the money. Each comes out of its own chapter of the Texas Family Code, each is decided under its own standard, and each can be revisited on its own grounds long after the ink dries. The guides in this section take the pieces one at a time. This page is about how they fit together.

One habit runs through all of them. Where a guide asserts a rule of law, the assertion links to the Family Code section that states it, on the Legislature's official statute site. Texas Legal Answers works that way on every page, and the guides below are no exception.

Rights come before the calendar

Texas courts do not grant custody under that name. They appoint conservators, then divide a statutory list of parental rights and duties between them: designating where a child lives, consenting to medical treatment, making education decisions. Under section 153.002, the child's best interest governs every one of those choices as the court's primary concern. Whether the parents end up as joint managing conservators, or one becomes sole managing conservator with the other possessory, settles who holds which rights, and nothing more than that. The conservatorship guide explains the labels and the presumptions behind them.

None of those labels puts the child in a particular house on a particular weekend. That is the possession order, a calendar built separately in the same decree, and Texas supplies a template for it: a schedule of weekends, Thursday evenings, holidays, and summer blocks that section 153.252 presumes to be reasonable minimum possession and in the child's best interest. What the template awards, the elections that expand it, and the distance rules that reshape it are the subject of the standard possession order guide.

Support runs on a formula

Child support begins as arithmetic. Section 154.125 fixes a percentage by the number of children, and the percentage applies to the paying parent's monthly net resources, a figure the statute defines line by line. Judgment enters at the edges: a published cap limits how far the percentages reach, medical and dental support stack on top, and a court can order a different amount when the evidence rebuts the guideline presumption. The guide to the child support formula works the whole calculation through, cap included.

Paternity is the gate for unmarried parents

Both kinds of order above attach to legal parents, and an unmarried biological father is not one until the law says so. Chapter 160 offers three routes in: a presumption, built mostly on marriage; a signed acknowledgment of paternity, which once filed has the effect of a court adjudication under section 160.305; and a parentage suit in which genetic testing does the deciding. Until one of the three happens there is no support obligation to calculate and no possession schedule to award. The guide to establishing paternity covers the three routes and the deadlines attached to them.

Orders change, and orders get enforced

A family order is built to outlast the circumstances that produced it, so chapter 156 provides a controlled way to reopen one. The central ground, under section 156.101, is that circumstances have materially and substantially changed since the order. Tighter gates guard a change of the child's primary residence during the order's first year, and support has an arithmetic trigger of its own. The guide to modifying custody or support maps which standard applies to which request.

An order that is ignored rather than outgrown goes the other direction: back before the court on a motion for enforcement, where section 157.001 lets the court enforce any provision by contempt. The pleading rules reward a parent who kept notes, because a possession motion has to name each denied occasion. The guide to enforcing a visitation order starts there, with the record, then follows the motion through contempt, clarification, and habeas corpus.

Grandparents have one narrow door

The Family Code does let a grandparent ask a court for time with a grandchild over a parent's objection, and then makes the request hard to win by design. Section 153.433 conditions any award on proof of the significant-impairment showing that section spells out, and on the grandparent's own child being dead, incompetent, in jail or prison in the three months before suit, or without access of their own. The guide to grandparent rights states that bar the way the statute does, without softening it.

Divorce decides much of this at once

When the parents are married to each other, the questions arrive bundled. A divorce is a lawsuit that ends the marriage, divides the community estate, and, where there are minor children, resolves conservatorship, possession, and support inside the same decree. It has gates of its own: a residency requirement, and a waiting period under section 6.702 that bars granting the divorce before the 60th day after the suit is filed, with narrow exceptions involving family violence. The guide to how divorce works in Texas follows the case from the residency rules to the decree.

The marriage itself: proof, support, and names

Three questions sit at the edges of a divorce and are asked just as often on their own. The first is whether a marriage exists at all. Texas recognizes a marriage without a license or ceremony when the couple agreed to be married, lived together in this state as spouses, and represented to others that they were married, the three elements of section 2.401. No number of years creates one, and the guide to common law marriage in Texas explains how such a marriage is proved and why ending it takes a divorce.

The second is money for a spouse after the decree. Court-ordered maintenance is narrow by design: chapter 8 limits who qualifies, caps each monthly payment at $5,000 or a fifth of the obligor's average monthly gross income, whichever is smaller, under section 8.055, and limits how long an order can last. The guide to spousal maintenance sets those limits beside the agreed alimony a couple can write into their own decree. The third is a name. Chapter 45 governs petitions to change an adult's or a child's name, and a divorce decree can restore a prior name in the same order, both covered in changing your name in Texas.