Alimony in Mississippi.
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 stateMississippi
There is no arithmetic in Mississippi’s statute. The court decides the amount and the length from the factors below, and two judges on the same facts can reach different answers. That is not a flaw in how we are describing it; it is how the law is written.
Use the state’s own words
Mississippi calls it alimony. Miss. Code Ann. section 93-5-23 speaks of orders 'touching the maintenance and alimony of the wife or the husband, or any allowance to be made to her or him'. The statute uses no other term and does not name any category of alimony.. 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 — None. Section 93-5-23 says nothing about the length of the marriage, sets no bracket, no presumption and no maximum term, and does not distinguish among types of alimony by duration.
- Does behavior matter? — The statute is silent as to alimony.
- When it ends, and when it can change — The statute contains no termination provision for alimony.
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 — None. Section 93-5-23 says nothing about the length of the marriage, sets no bracket, no presumption and no maximum term, and does not distinguish among types of alimony by duration.
- Does behavior matter? — The statute is silent as to alimony.
- When it ends, and when it can change — The statute contains no termination provision for alimony.
In this subject 4
The power the court has
What the judge has to weigh
How long it lasts
Duration
None. Section 93-5-23 says nothing about the length of the marriage, sets no bracket, no presumption and no maximum term, and does not distinguish among types of alimony by duration. The categories Mississippi practice uses — periodic, lump sum, rehabilitative — appear nowhere in the section.
Does behavior matter?
Marital misconduct
The statute is silent as to alimony. It neither requires, permits nor bars consideration of marital misconduct in fixing alimony. Fault does appear elsewhere in the same chapter as a ground for divorce: section 93-5-1 lists twelve causes, including 'Adultery, unless it should appear that it was committed by collusion of the parties for the purpose of procuring a divorce, or unless the parties cohabited after a knowledge by complainant of the adultery.' That is a ground provision, not an alimony provision.
When it ends, and when it can change
What brings it to an end
The statute contains no termination provision for alimony. There is no statutory rule on death, on remarriage, on cohabitation or on retirement. The only termination rule in section 93-5-23 concerns children: 'The duty of support of a child terminates upon the emancipation of the child. The court may determine that emancipation has occurred pursuant to Section 93-11-65.' Mississippi's rules on terminating periodic alimony for remarriage or for a cohabiting or de facto marital relationship are judicial, not statutory; no case text is quoted here for the reason given under factors.
Changing it later
Statutory, and in one sentence. Section 93-5-23: 'The court may afterwards, on petition, change the decree, and make from time to time such new decrees as the case may require.' No threshold, standard or time limit is stated.
Worth knowing about Mississippi
Mississippi is the clearest example in this batch of a state whose alimony law is almost entirely case law resting on a nearly empty statute. That is the finding, and it is a useful one rather than a gap. Two further points. First, on currency: the Mississippi Code is published under contract by a commercial publisher, and the Mississippi Legislature's own site links out to it rather than hosting the codified text. The commercial site we could not read. The text quoted above was read from the Legislature's own reproduction of the section in House Bill 1388 of the 2024 Regular Session, a bill 'TO BRING FORWARD SECTIONS 93-5-1 THROUGH 93-5-34, MISSISSIPPI CODE OF 1972, WHICH GOVERN DIVORCE AND ALIMONY IN THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI, FOR PURPOSES OF AMENDMENT' — a bring-forward bill sets out the section exactly as it then stood. No amendment to section 93-5-23 in the 2025 or 2026 sessions was found, but the absence was not confirmed against a codified text, which is why this page is marked partial. Second, the carve-out in the middle of the section is unusual on its own terms: for alimony purposes, a party's interest as an heir at law of a living person, or under a third party's will, is not 'property', not 'an asset of a spouse', and may not be treated even as 'an economic circumstance or other factor'. That is a rare statutory instruction to a court to ignore an entire class of expectancy.
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.
Mississippi does not inherit the federal alimony rule — it has its own, and its two official statements of it do not match. Mississippi computes income under its own code rather than adopting the Internal Revenue Code wholesale, and the state return carries its own alimony lines: line 45 for alimony received, line 53 for alimony paid, with the date of divorce required on the return.
The current Form 80-100 instructions reach the federal answer: alimony paid is “deductible to the extent allowable for federal income tax purposes,” with the note that under the 2017 Act alimony is “no longer deductible for any agreement executed or modified after December 31, 2018.” The state’s own finalized regulation, however, has never been updated and still reads as it did before 2019: a deduction “is allowable with respect to payments in the nature of, or in lieu of alimony,” and “[t]his same amount must be included in the income of the spouse receiving the payment,” with no post-2018 carve-out anywhere in it. Both are official Mississippi sources and we are not going to pretend one of them does not exist. Follow the current form instructions — they are the ones the return is built on, they are current-year, and the regulation itself says the Commissioner “will follow the Federal Rules, Regulations and Revenue Procedures relating to alimony” unless instructed otherwise in writing. Four states do not conform their state income tax to it — Arkansas, California, New Jersey and New York — so this is worth knowing rather than assuming. The fifty-state table.
Source: Mississippi Department of Revenue, 2025 Form 80-100 instructions, lines 45 and 53; and Mississippi Administrative Code Title 35, Part III, Subpart 3, Chapter 01, ¶102 (Alimony and Separate Maintenance Payments), the finalized regulation the Department itself links as current. Mississippi publishes its code only through LexisNexis, not on a state domain, so no general conformity provision could be confirmed from a state source. the state source Checked 15 Sep 2026.
How far we got, and where we stopped
Mississippi’s code is published commercially and the Legislature links out to it. The section below came from the Legislature’s own bring-forward bill, which sets the section out as it then stood. What is unconfirmed is currency past 2024, not the wording.
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 Mississippi calculates child support, and the overnight count that moves it more than income does.
And the question underneath it
What Mississippi presumes about custody, and what the judge has to weigh.
The rest of what we have written about Mississippi. Every figure is quoted from Mississippi’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.