The divorce glossary: what your state calls it

Every state uses one of two systems to decide who owns what at divorce. Community property treats almost everything earned or acquired during the marriage as owned 50/50 by both spouses from the moment it is acquired. Equitable distribution treats marital property as belonging to whoever earned or titled it, then lets a judge divide it in whatever shares feels fair, which is often but not always an even split.

Where it bites. In a community property state a spouse’s ownership share is fixed by law before a judge ever gets involved, which changes negotiating leverage from day one. In equitable distribution states the actual split depends on a judge’s weighing of factors, so two couples with identical finances in different equitable distribution states, or even different judges in the same state, can land on very different splits.

4 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 1 on a bar association or law school site; 11 more we found but would not publish, because the only source was a law firm’s marketing page or an encyclopedia. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: Wisconsin calls its system ‘marital property,’ not ‘community property,’ but it was enacted under the Uniform Marital Property Act specifically to produce community-property-style 50/50 default ownership, so most surveys count it as the ninth community property state.

Caution: The opt-in community property trust states (Alaska, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida) do not change how an ordinary divorce is decided. They let a couple who affirmatively creates the trust get community-property tax basis treatment; a couple who never sets one up divorces under that state’s normal equitable distribution rules. Treating these states as ‘community property states’ for divorce purposes is a common and consequential error.

Caution: Whether other equitable distribution states besides Kansas are properly ‘kitchen sink’ (all property, any source, subject to division) versus limited to property acquired during the marriage could not be fully verified for all 41 remaining states. Confirm the scope of ‘marital property’ under your own state’s statute rather than assume it.

No two states are required to use the same word for the payments one spouse makes to the other after divorce. Common terms are alimony, spousal support, maintenance, and spousal maintenance; the legal effect is similar, but the statute you need to read only uses one of these words.

Where it bites. Searching a state’s law using the wrong term (for example, searching ‘alimony’ in a maintenance state) can lead a reader past the actual governing statute entirely, or into another state’s law that happens to rank highly in search results.

10 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 16 more we found but would not publish, because the only source was a law firm’s marketing page or an encyclopedia. Checked 31 August 2026.

Why the New Jersey links go to the portal rather than the section. New Jersey’s statutes database addresses sections by node number, and those numbers are reassigned every time the corpus is republished — so a direct link works until it silently does not. We link the portal and name the section instead. Search the section number from there.

Caution: Several aggregator sources disagree on borderline cases (for example whether a given state’s term is best described as ‘spousal support’ or ‘spousal maintenance’ when a statute uses both words). Rows sourced only to divorce.law are marked moderate confidence and should be spot-checked against the cited statute before publishing as a definitive claim.

Caution: Types of alimony, verified: bridge-the-gap alimony (Fla. Stat. s. 61.08(6), maximum 2 years, transition support, non-modifiable, ends on death or the recipient’s remarriage) and durational alimony (Fla. Stat. s. 61.08(8), a set period tied to the length of the marriage) are both distinctly Florida statutory creations. Rehabilitative alimony (Fla. Stat. s. 61.08(7), tied to a specific plan to become self-supporting, maximum 5 years in Florida but recognized by name in many other states too) supports a spouse while they retrain or re-enter the workforce. Reimbursement alimony compensates a spouse for direct financial contributions made to the other spouse’s education or career during the marriage. Lump sum alimony is a fixed, one-time or fully-scheduled payment rather than an ongoing modifiable award.

Caution: Florida’s 2023 reform (effective for cases filed on or after July 1, 2023) eliminated permanent alimony by statute. Fla. Stat. s. 61.08(1)(a) as amended lists only temporary, bridge-the-gap, rehabilitative, or durational alimony as the forms a Florida court may award, confirmed directly against the current statute text.

Caution: Massachusetts (2012 alimony reform act) and Colorado (2013 reform, adopting non-presumptive guideline maintenance) are commonly cited as having also moved away from lifetime or permanent alimony, but this research relied on secondary summaries for those two and did not independently confirm the exact statutory language; treat as moderate confidence pending a direct statute read.

A growing number of states have rewritten their family codes to remove the word custody altogether, replacing it with language about parental rights, responsibilities, decision-making authority, or time with the child, on the theory that ‘custody’ sounds like winning and losing a possession, which is not how courts want parents to think about their children.

Where it bites. A reader searching their own state’s law for ‘custody’ may find nothing, or may find only case law using an outdated term, if their state’s statute no longer uses that word. Knowing the actual statutory vocabulary is often the only way to find the controlling law.

9 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: The Minnesota row above is included specifically to correct a common misconception; the state is not part of the no-custody group despite sometimes being grouped with Colorado and others online.

Caution: In the eight no-custody states listed, older case law and many law firm websites still use the word custody informally even though it is not the operative statutory term, which can be confusing when comparing a firm’s plain-language explanation to the actual statute.

Imputed income is when a court calculates child support based not on what a parent actually earns, but on what the court decides that parent could and should be earning. States differ sharply on how easily a court can do this.

Where it bites. This is often the single biggest lever in a contested child support case. Whether a state requires proof that the parent deliberately tanked their income (bad faith), only that they are voluntarily out of work below their ability (voluntary underemployment), or requires no showing of intent at all and looks only at demonstrated earning capacity, changes both the outcome and what evidence a parent needs to gather.

5 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 1 on a bar association or law school site. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: How a state treats a parent who stays home with a child varies even among states that otherwise use a strict voluntary-underemployment or bad-faith standard. Florida and Colorado both give courts explicit statutory room to decline imputation for a caregiving parent, Florida generally and Colorado specifically for a child under 24 months; North Carolina, Texas, California and New York do not have an equivalent express carve-out in the sections reviewed here, and instead leave the caregiving question to the court’s general best-interests or good-faith analysis.

Caution: This axis covers only six states in depth to keep every claim quote-verified against a statute, official court document, or a cited appellate case; a reader in a state not listed here should not assume their state falls at either extreme of this spectrum without checking their own statute.

Legal separation is a court order that resolves support, custody and sometimes property between spouses who remain legally married. Not every state offers this option, and among the states that do, the name for it varies more than most people expect.

Where it bites. A couple in a state without legal separation who wants court-ordered support or custody terms without ending the marriage has to use a different, sometimes more limited, legal tool, or simply cannot get one at all and must either divorce or handle things informally.

7 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 3 more we found but would not publish, because the only source was a law firm’s marketing page or an encyclopedia. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: This axis relied heavily on a single secondary aggregator (a Justia 50-state survey) for the negative claims (which states lack the proceeding) and for several of the alternate-name rows, because confirming an absence directly against fifty individual state codes was outside this research’s search budget. Treat every ‘no legal separation’ row as moderate confidence and verify against the specific state’s family code before publishing it as a hard claim.

Caution: Separate maintenance, as a category, is meaningfully different from legal separation in most states that have both concepts available: a separate maintenance action is typically narrower, focused on ongoing support (and sometimes custody) between spouses who are not seeking to end the marriage or divide property, while a full legal separation decree, where available, more closely mirrors a divorce decree in scope, sometimes including property division, without terminating marital status.

Caution: The commonly repeated six-state list (Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas) is not accurate as usually presented: Georgia and Mississippi both have a support-focused alternative (separate maintenance) even though neither has a proceeding called ‘legal separation.’ Whether that alternative should count as ‘having legal separation’ is partly a definitional choice the site should make explicitly rather than repeat the commonly cited list uncritically.

Three different time-based rules get confused with each other. A residency requirement is how long you must have lived in the state before you can even file. A waiting period, or cooling-off period, is how long the court must wait after filing before it can enter a final decree. A separation requirement as a ground is a period spouses must have already lived apart before they are even eligible to file for divorce on that basis.

Where it bites. These three clocks run differently and some states have more than one running at once. Confusing ‘how long you must live apart before you can file’ with ‘how long after filing before the decree is final’ leads to badly wrong timeline expectations for someone planning a divorce.

4 more we found but would not publish, because the only source was a law firm’s marketing page or an encyclopedia. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: This axis was researched primarily through a secondary aggregator (divorce.law) rather than confirmed against each cited statute’s primary text directly, because of the search budget for this job. The California and North Carolina statute cites in particular should be read against the actual code sections before being presented on the site as verified.

Caution: Many states layer more than one of these three requirements at once (a residency requirement to file, plus a separate waiting period before the decree), and a state with a short residency requirement is not necessarily fast overall if it also has a long post-filing waiting period, or vice versa; the site should present these as three independent clocks, not a single ‘how long does divorce take’ number.

This is the date a court uses to price the house, the 401(k), the business, or the stock account before dividing it. Some states lock that date at separation, some at the filing of the divorce complaint, some at trial, and some leave it to the judge’s discretion, sometimes using a different date for different kinds of assets.

Where it bites. A stock portfolio, a business, or a house can be worth a very different amount six months or two years apart. If the rule is ‘date of separation’ and the house gains 200,000 dollars in value before trial, the spouse who moved out may never see a share of that gain. If the rule is ‘date of trial’ instead, a business that grew because one spouse worked eighty-hour weeks after separation can suddenly become half the other spouse’s asset too. Which date a state picks decides who gets the appreciation, and it is rarely explained to people going through a divorce.

12 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: New Jersey’s Painter rule fixes the cutoff for what counts as marital property (the complaint date), which is a related but distinct question from the date used to price an already-included asset; the two get blurred in casual explanations.

Caution: Pennsylvania and several other states apply one valuation approach to ordinary marital assets and a different, narrower one to the marital share of an asset that was separate property before the marriage.

Caution: The active versus passive distinction (explained on this page) is decided case by case within many of these states and is not always spelled out in the statute itself, so the citations above give the state’s default date, not how every asset type is actually treated.

A no-fault divorce lets either spouse end the marriage without proving the other did anything wrong, typically by citing irreconcilable differences or a period of separation. A fault ground requires proving specific misconduct, like adultery or cruelty, to get the divorce itself. These are separate from the question of whether that same misconduct can affect how much alimony is awarded or how property is divided, which some no-fault states still allow.

Where it bites. A state can be no-fault for the divorce itself while still statutorily punishing (or statutorily ignoring) an affair when it comes to writing the alimony check, and the two rules do not always align the way people assume.

1 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 3 on a bar association or law school site. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: The American Bar Association’s 50-state family law chart, used as the main source for the broad fault-based versus no-fault state counts here, is a reasonable secondary source but was read through an automated summary rather than the full underlying table, and its classification of some individual states (for example listing California among states that ‘permit’ fault consideration) reads as inconsistent with California’s well-known no-fault framework; that specific row should be independently re-verified before publication rather than repeated as stated.

Caution: Because of the search budget, this axis names only four states in real depth (South Carolina, California, Texas, New York) rather than the full spread the brief envisioned; the site should treat the broader ‘which states bar or permit fault consideration’ lists as a starting point for further verification, not a finished, citable fact set.

Dissipation is spending, gambling away, gifting to someone outside the marriage, or destroying marital money or property, usually after the marriage has started to break down. When a court finds it happened, it can charge the value back against the spending spouse’s share instead of splitting the loss between both people.

Where it bites. If one spouse spends 40,000 dollars on an affair, a gambling habit, or gifts to a new partner while the marriage is falling apart, that money is gone from the pool the couple would otherwise split. Without a dissipation claim, both spouses effectively absorb half that loss. With one, the court can award the other spouse an offsetting amount from the dissipating spouse’s share, so the loss lands on the person who caused it instead of being split down the middle.

10 read on a legislature’s or court’s own site; 1 on a bar association or law school site. Checked 31 August 2026.

Caution: New York and North Carolina both bar considering marital misconduct generally when dividing property, but each still allows a dissipation or waste claim as its own separate, narrower factor; readers often assume a no-fault state cannot touch this kind of spending, and that is wrong.

Caution: Missouri and Colorado do not use the word ‘dissipation’ in their statutes at all; what functions as a dissipation claim there is really a judge applying a broader ‘conduct’ or ‘economic fault’ factor, so the strength of a claim depends much more on the specific case law than on statutory text.

Caution: Where a case citation above lacks a page-pinned quote, the citation itself is still to a source we verified directly (a state court, state legislature, or bar-association document), not to a law firm’s summary of it.

• The main glossary — 57 terms in plain English
• Your state’s forms and deadlines
• Alimony in all fifty states
• Custody in all fifty states
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