Alimony in Georgia.
Whether the state sets a formula or leaves it to the judge, what the court has to weigh, how long it runs, and what brings it to an end.
See a different stateGeorgia
Not established from an official Georgia source. No Georgia statutory alimony formula, cap or presumptive amount appears in any Act or Office of Legislative Counsel document read on legis.ga.gov for the sessions 2001 through 2026. Two things are worth recording precisely. First, a bill was introduced in 2003 that would have created both a duration cap and an amount cap, and it did not pass: House Bill 749 (2003-2004) proposed a new O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-5(b) providing that 'in no circumstance shall the length of time for which permanent alimony is awarded exceed one-fourth of the length of time of the marriage', and a new subsection (c) providing that 'The total amount of alimony awarded on a monthly basis shall not exceed 10 percent of the gross monthly income of the party obligated to pay alimony.' Neither became law: the Office of Legislative Counsel's Summary of General Statutes Enacted volumes for 2006 through 2026 record no Act amending Code Section 19-6-5 at all. Second, Georgia's only statutory presumptive support figures traceable through the Acts are in the child support obligation table in O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-15, amended repeatedly and most recently by HB 1268 in 2026; that is child support, not alimony. This is an absence of evidence in the Acts, not a confirmed absence in the Code.
Use the state’s own words
Georgia calls it alimony. Chapter 6 of Title 19 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is, in the General Assembly's own words, the chapter 'relating to alimony and child support in general' (House Bill 21, 2003-2004 Regular Session, SECTION 1). Beyond that description, no Georgia term of art was verified from a Georgia source on the checked date.. Using the state’s own term matters when you are searching for forms or reading an order — the words are not interchangeable across state lines, and some of them mean different things in different places.
The short version4 points · tap one to jump to it
- What the law actually says
- How long it lasts
- Does behavior matter? — The proposition is that O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-1(b) makes adultery or desertion by the party seeking alimony a bar rather than a factor.
- When it ends, and when it can change — Not established. O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-19 is the section that carries Georgia's revision-of-judgment and cohabitation provisions, and its text we could not read from a Georgia state source on the checked date.
In this subject 4
What the law actually says
The short version4 points · tap one to jump to it
- What the law actually says
- How long it lasts
- Does behavior matter? — The proposition is that O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-1(b) makes adultery or desertion by the party seeking alimony a bar rather than a factor.
- When it ends, and when it can change — Not established. O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-19 is the section that carries Georgia's revision-of-judgment and cohabitation provisions, and its text we could not read from a Georgia state source on the checked date.
In this subject 4
The power the court has
What the judge has to weigh
How long it lasts
Duration
Not established. The only Georgia material we found on duration is the unenacted 2003 proposal quoted above, and the note at the foot of this page sets out why we could get no further.
Does behavior matter?
Marital misconduct
Not established, and this is the Georgia claim most worth testing. The proposition is that O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-1(b) makes adultery or desertion by the party seeking alimony a bar rather than a factor. That proposition is repeated constantly in secondary material and, if true, would make Georgia one of the very few states in which marital fault defeats an alimony claim outright rather than reducing it. We do not assert it here, because the operative words of s. 19-6-1 we could not read from a Georgia state source. One adjacent piece of Georgia legislative drafting is worth recording because it shows the form such a bar takes in Georgia and shows that in 2005 it did NOT exist for property: House Bill 44 (2005-2006 Regular Session) proposed to rewrite O.C.G.A. s. 19-5-13, the divorce property section, to add 'provided, however, that a party shall not be entitled to any of the marital property if it is established by a preponderance of the evidence that the separation between the parties was caused by that party's adultery.' That bill did not pass. It is evidence about the drafting idiom, not about s. 19-6-1. Read at https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/html/20052006/47633
When it ends, and when it can change
What brings it to an end
Not established. O.C.G.A. s. 19-6-19 is the section that carries Georgia's revision-of-judgment and cohabitation provisions, and its text we could not read from a Georgia state source on the checked date. No Georgia cohabitation definition is quoted here.
Changing it later
Not established, for the same reason.
Worth knowing about Georgia
The unusual thing about Georgia here is the source problem itself, and it belongs on the page in plain language. Georgia is one of a small number of states whose legislature does not publish its own code for free. The Georgia General Assembly's website contains exactly one link to the Code, and it points off-site to a commercial publisher at 'http://www.lexisnexis.com/hottopics/gacode' — that string is in the site's own JavaScript bundle at https://www.legis.ga.gov/main.f3b17f83c46a0b38a9be.js. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court of the United States held that the annotations in the Official Code of Georgia Annotated are not copyrightable because they are authored by an arm of the legislature; the State's own site still routes readers to a commercial platform for the Code. The practical consequence is that the Georgia alimony statutes are the only ones in this batch of twelve that could not be quoted from a state source. What Georgia does publish freely, and what was used here, is the full text of every bill and Act since 2001 and the Office of Legislative Counsel's annual Summary of General Statutes Enacted; those are enough to prove a negative about amendments and to recover official catchlines, and not enough to recover the text of a section that has not been amended since before 2001.
The tax rule changed, and most guides still describe the old one
For a divorce or separation instrument executed after 31 December 2018, alimony is not deductible by the person paying it and not taxable to the person receiving it. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act repealed the provisions that made it otherwise. For an instrument executed on or before that date the old treatment continues — deductible to the payer, taxable to the recipient — unless it is later modified and the modification expressly adopts the new rule.
This is not a detail. Under the old rule a higher-rate payer could transfer income to a lower-rate recipient and the two of them shared the saving. That saving no longer exists, which changes what a given number is worth to each side. New Hampshire wrote the point into its own statute: its 23 per cent figure assumes non-deductibility, and reverts to 30 per cent if the federal treatment is ever restored.
Alongside the federal rule, Georgia’s own income tax follows the federal treatment. That means the federal answer above is the whole answer here — no state adjustment for alimony either way. Four states do not — Arkansas, California, New Jersey and New York — so this is worth knowing rather than assuming. Worth one more line, because it decides what happens if the federal rule ever changes: Georgia does not adopt federal tax changes automatically. It uses the Internal Revenue Code as enacted on or before 1 January 2026, and later federal changes do not apply until the legislature adopts them. Two official Georgia sources disagree and we are not going to pick one: the Department’s own standing conformity page still ends at 1 January 2024, while the Department’s 2026 legislative summary says House Bill 1199 moved the date to 1 January 2026. Neither page warns you about the other. The fifty-state table.
Source: Georgia Dept. of Revenue, ‘Income Tax Federal Tax Changes’ (describing H.B. 1162 (2024), which ‘adopted to conform to the Internal Revenue Code as amended…enacted on or before January 1, 2024,’ with no alimony non-conformity item listed among Georgia’s federal tax changes since 2018) the state source
How far we got, and where we stopped
Georgia does not publish its own code for free — the General Assembly links out to a commercial publisher. We read every enacted Act and every session summary the Legislature itself publishes from 2001 to 2026, and the alimony sections do not appear in any of them, which means no Act reprints the current text and the reconstruction route we used for Georgia custody is closed here.
What that means for you: the words above are reliable — every quoted passage came from a source we name and link. What we cannot vouch for is that nothing has changed since, or that the subsection numbering matches what a subscription service would show. If you are citing a section in a filing, check the number against a law library copy. Quote the words with confidence.
The other number that decides your budget
How Georgia calculates child support, and the overnight count that moves it more than income does.
And the question underneath it
What Georgia presumes about custody, and what the judge has to weigh.
The rest of what we have written about Georgia. Every figure is quoted from Georgia’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.