Alimony in Indiana

Does Indiana have an alimony formula?

No formula for the amount. There is a limit on how long.

No formula, cap or presumptive amount for the amount of maintenance was recorded, and none was found from any source. Indiana's only numeric maintenance rule is a limit on duration and it reaches one of the three kinds of maintenance only, as the duration section below sets out. Indiana's Child Support Rules and Guidelines are adopted by the Indiana Supreme Court and are presumptive for child support; no maintenance guideline exists. This is subject to the same limitation as the rest of this page.

The limit is on how long, not how much.

Use the state’s own words

Indiana calls it maintenance. Indiana's dissolution statutes do not use 'alimony'; IC 31-15-7-1 and IC 31-15-7-2 speak of 'maintenance', with 'rehabilitative maintenance' named as one of three kinds. This has not been re-checked against the current code; the note at the foot of this page says why.. 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.

What the law actually says

The power the court has

IC 31-15-7-1 (order for maintenance); IC 31-15-7-2 (findings concerning maintenance); IC 31-15-7-3 (modification or revocation); IC 31-15-4-8 (temporary orders); IC 31-15-2-17 (agreements)Not verified against the current code. The text below is what an earlier reading recorded from Indiana's own static Indiana Code file at the address above. When we went back to check it on 23 August 2026, that address – and every other path on iga.in.gov, including the site's own JavaScript bundle and its manifest – returned the same 691-byte application shell instead of any statutory text. So nothing below has been checked against what Indiana publishes today. Recorded text: IC 31-15-7-1: 'Sec. 1. The court may order maintenance in: (1) final dissolution of marriage decrees entered under IC 31-15-2-16; and (2) legal separation decrees entered under IC 31-15-3-9; after making the findings required by section 2 of this chapter.' IC 31-15-4-8(a): 'The court may issue an order for temporary maintenance or support in such amounts and on such terms that are just and proper. However, the court shall require that the support payments be made through the clerk of the circuit court as trustee for remittance to the person entitled to receive benefits, unless the court has reasonable grounds for providing or approving another method of payment.'

What the judge has to weigh

IC 31-15-7-1 (order for maintenance); IC 31-15-7-2 (findings concerning maintenance); IC 31-15-7-3 (modification or revocation); IC 31-15-4-8 (temporary orders); IC 31-15-2-17 (agreements) — the factorsNot verified, for the reason given above. Indiana has no general factor list. It has three separate statutory findings, each with its own trigger, and only the third has enumerated criteria. Recorded text of IC 31-15-7-2: 'Sec. 2. A court may make the following findings concerning maintenance: (1) If the court finds a spouse to be physically or mentally incapacitated to the extent that the ability of the incapacitated spouse to support himself or herself is materially affected, the court may find that maintenance for the spouse is necessary during the period of incapacity, subject to further order of the court. (2) If the court finds that: (A) a spouse lacks sufficient property, including marital property apportioned to the spouse, to provide for the spouse's needs; and (B) the spouse is the custodian of a child whose physical or mental incapacity requires the custodian to forgo employment; the court may find that maintenance is necessary for the spouse in an amount and for a period of time that the court considers appropriate. (3) After considering: (A) the educational level of each spouse at the time of marriage and at the time the action is commenced; (B) whether an interruption in the education, training, or employment of a spouse who is seeking maintenance occurred during the marriage as a result of homemaking or child care responsibilities, or both; (C) the earning capacity of each spouse, including educational background, training, employment skills, work experience, and length of presence in or absence from the job market; and (D) the time and expense necessary to acquire sufficient education or training to enable the spouse who is seeking maintenance to find appropriate employment; a court may find that rehabilitative maintenance for the spouse seeking maintenance is necessary in an amount and for a period of time that the court considers appropriate, but not to exceed three (3) years from the date of the final decree.'

How long it lasts

Duration

Indiana does cap rehabilitative maintenance at three years – and this is what an earlier reading recorded, unverified on 23 August 2026 for the reason given above. It is and it is narrower than usually reported. The three-year limit is statutory and post-divorce, and it applies ONLY to rehabilitative maintenance. Recorded closing words of IC 31-15-7-2(3): 'a court may find that rehabilitative maintenance for the spouse seeking maintenance is necessary in an amount and for a period of time that the court considers appropriate, but not to exceed three (3) years from the date of the final decree.' Incapacity maintenance under IC 31-15-7-2(1) was recorded as running 'during the period of incapacity, subject to further order of the court', with no time limit; caregiver maintenance under IC 31-15-7-2(2) as running 'for a period of time that the court considers appropriate', with no time limit. Nothing in the recorded text ties any of the three to the length of the marriage. On that text, the common statement that 'Indiana caps maintenance at three years' is true of one of three kinds and false of the other two. Because the source we could not read on the checked date, a reader who needs to rely on the three-year limit should read IC 31-15-7-2 in the Indiana Code itself.

Does behavior matter?

Marital misconduct

Not verified, for the reason given above. What we recorded is that IC 31-15-7-2 contains no fault factor and no fault bar, and that the contrast with the property statute in the same chapter is instructive: IC 31-15-7-5(4) makes 'The conduct of the parties during the marriage as related to the disposition or dissipation of their property' a ground for rebutting the presumption of equal division, and no equivalent appears in the maintenance section.

When it ends, and when it can change

What brings it to an end

Not verified, for the reason given above. What we recorded is that IC 31-15-7 contains no provision terminating maintenance on death, remarriage, cohabitation or retirement; that incapacity maintenance is expressly 'subject to further order of the court'; and that rehabilitative maintenance ends by its own three-year outside limit.

Changing it later

Not verified, for the reason given above. The recorded text of IC 31-15-7-3: 'Sec. 3. Provisions of an order with respect to maintenance ordered under section 1 of this chapter (or IC 31-1-11.5-9(c) before its repeal) may be modified or revoked. Except as provided in IC 31-16-8-2, modification may be made only: (1) upon a showing of changed circumstances so substantial and continuing as to make the terms unreasonable; or (2) upon a showing that: (A) a party has been ordered to pay an amount in child support that differs by more than twenty percent (20%) from the amount that would be ordered by applying the child support guidelines; and (B) the order requested to be modified or revoked was issued at least twelve (12) months before the petition requesting modification was filed.' On agreements, the recorded position is that IC 31-15-2-17(a) permits the parties to 'agree in writing to provisions for: (1) the maintenance of either of the parties …', that IC 31-15-2-17(b)(1) provides that 'the terms of the agreement, if approved by the court, shall be incorporated and merged into the decree and the parties shall be ordered to perform the terms', and that the non-modification sentence in IC 31-15-2-17(c) — 'The disposition of property settled by an agreement described in subsection (a) and incorporated and merged into the decree is not subject to subsequent modification by the court, except as the agreement prescribes or the parties subsequently consent' — is written about property, not maintenance. On that text the statute does not in terms make agreed maintenance non-modifiable.

Worth knowing about Indiana

On the recorded text, Indiana is the closest thing in this batch to a state that has abolished alimony: maintenance may be ordered only after one of the three findings in IC 31-15-7-2 — incapacity, care of an incapacitated child, or rehabilitation — and there is no general needs-and-ability award available to a healthy spouse of a long marriage. Reading note on the block, stated precisely because it is unusual and a reader may hit it too: on 2026-08-23 iga.in.gov was served through CloudFront from an Amazon S3 origin whose replication status header read PENDING, and every path on the host returned the same 691-byte application shell with content-type text/html — including /manifest.json and the site's own /static/js/main.0fd45481.js. A cache-busting query string, a Range request, plain HTTP and the www host all produced the same result. api.iga.in.gov answered 403 with 'x-api-key not found'. http://www.in.gov/legislative redirects to iga.in.gov. No workaround was attempted beyond those requests.

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, Indiana’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. The fifty-state table.
Source: Ind. Code § 6-3-1-11 (definition of ‘Internal Revenue Code’) and Ind. Code § 6-3-1-3.5 (adjusted gross income modifications) the state source

Authority: Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Pub. L. 115-97, section 11051, repealing Internal Revenue Code sections 71 and 215; see also IRS Publication 504.

Authority: IC 31-15-7-1 (order for maintenance); IC 31-15-7-2 (findings concerning maintenance); IC 31-15-7-3 (modification or revocation); IC 31-15-4-8 (temporary orders); IC 31-15-2-17 (agreements) — read it on Indiana’s own site. Checked 23 Aug 2026.

How far we got, and where we stopped

The Indiana General Assembly’s site served an application shell rather than statutory text on every path we tried, including its own asset files. The text below is carried forward and marked unverified rather than dropped.

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 Indiana calculates child support, and the overnight count that moves it more than income does.

Child support →

And the question underneath it

What Indiana presumes about custody, and what the judge has to weigh.

Custody →

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Alimony in Indiana.