Travel, custody and relocation in New York

The passport rules are federal and read the same everywhere. This page is the other layer — what New York law and New York’s own court forms say about taking your child on a trip, moving, and who holds the passport between journeys.

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Read this alongside the federal rules

Getting a child’s passport, consent letters, the Hague Convention and what actually stops a departure are the same in all fifty states — they are on the main travel page. Start there, then come back here for the part that varies.

Custody jurisdictionN.Y. Dom. Rel. Law art. 5-A, §§ 75 to 78-a… Which state’s court may decide custody — and why a holiday elsewhere does not move it.
Abduction Prevention ActNoThe court still has its own powers; it just has no uniform-act toolkit to draw on.
Relocation noticeNo notice period No relocation statute; governed by case law.
Triggered byNot distance-based What turns a move into a legal event in New York.

Which court decides — and why a trip does not change it

New York custody jurisdiction sits under N.Y. Dom. Rel. Law art. 5-A, §§ 75 to 78-a (Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act). The home-state definition is at N.Y. Dom. Rel. Law § 75-a(7): “‘Home state’ means the state in which a child lived with a parent or a person acting as a parent for at least six consecutive months immediately before the commencement of a child custody proceeding. In the case of a child less than six months of age, the term means the state in which the child lived from birth with any of the persons mentioned. A period of temporary absence of any of the mentioned persons is part of the period.”. The practical point for travel is this: a child’s home state is where they lived for six consecutive months before a case started, and a temporary absence counts toward that period. A summer with grandparents in another state does not start a clock there, and it does not let the other parent file somewhere new.

Abduction-prevention powers

New York has not enacted the Uniform Child Abduction Prevention Act. A judge here still has general power to impose travel conditions, but there is no dedicated statutory menu of abduction-prevention measures to point to. If risk is a live issue, the federal route on the main travel page — a valid, enforceable order prohibiting removal, routed to CBP — matters more here, not less.

Moving, and how much warning you owe

NEW YORK HAS no RELOCATION STATUTE. There is no provision of the Domestic Relations Law or the Family Court Act that imposes a relocation notice period, a mileage trigger, or a burden of proof for a parent who wants to move with a child. There is nothing to cite, and any source that supplies a New York relocation section number, a number of days’ notice, or a mileage figure as a matter of statewide law is wrong. Relocation in New York is governed entirely by case law, and specifically by the Court of Appeals decision in Tropea. Notice periods and distance triggers do exist in individual New York cases only because the parties’ own stipulation or a particular judge’s order put them there — they are terms of that order, not statewide rules.

Governed by case law, not statute. Matter of Tropea v. Tropea (and the companion case Matter of Browner v. Kenward), 87 N.Y.2d 727, decided by the Court of Appeals of New York on March 26, 1996. Verified in the New York Official Reports archive hosted by the Unified Court System at nycourts.gov. Tropea rejected the earlier three-tier/exceptional-circumstances framework and held: ‘Each relocation request must be considered on its own merits with due consideration of all the relevant facts and circumstances and with predominant emphasis being placed on what outcome is most likely to serve the best interests of the child.’ The factors the Court listed are ‘each parent’s reasons for seeking or opposing the move, the quality of the relationships between the child and the custodial and noncustodial parents, the impact of the move on the quantity and quality of the child’s future contact with the noncustodial parent, the degree to which the custodial parent’s and child’s life may be enhanced economically, emotionally and educationally by the move, and the feasibility of preserving the relationship between the noncustodial parent and child through suitable visitation arrangements.’ The opinion discusses no New York relocation statute, because there is none.

Relocation and vacation are different questions, and orders often treat them in the same paragraph. A trip is temporary; a move changes the child’s residence. Read your own order for which one your plan actually is before you assume the relocation rule does not apply.

What the standard order says about travel

New York has no single statewide parenting order. Travel terms come from your own order and from local court rules, which vary by county or district. Read your order rather than a template.

New York has no statewide standard possession order, model parenting order, or statewide parenting-plan form. The Unified Court System’s statewide family forms are pleadings — the Petition for Custody/Visitation and the custody/visitation modification and enforcement petitions — not a default parenting schedule, and they contain no travel, notice, itinerary or passport terms. Parenting-plan templates in New York are local: the one that turns up most often, nycourts.gov/forms/matrimonial/ParentingPlanForm.pdf, is captioned ‘SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF NEW YORK – PART ___’ — a New York County Supreme Court part form, binding on that part’s litigants, not on the state. What a New York parenting order says about vacation travel, advance notice, itineraries, international travel and passport custody therefore depends entirely on what the parties negotiate or the individual judge imposes. There is no statewide default to fall back on if the order is silent.

Who holds the passport

Nothing in New York’s statutes or standard forms addresses who holds the child’s passport. That is not a gap you have to live with — it is a clause you can ask for, and the federal rules above are the reason to.

What catches people out in New York

New York has no relocation statute. The governing authority is Matter of Tropea v. Tropea, 87 N.Y.2d 727 (1996). Do not cite a Domestic Relations Law section for relocation notice — none exists.
Because Tropea supplies no notice period and no mileage trigger, a New York parent’s duty to give advance notice of a move exists only if their own order or stipulation says so. A silent order means no statutory notice duty at all — but moving anyway can still be litigated after the fact as a change of circumstances.
Tropea abolished the old tiered analysis. Older New York authority applying an ‘exceptional circumstances’ threshold or a presumption tied to whether the move deprives the noncustodial parent of ‘regular and meaningful access’ does not survive Tropea; the test is unweighted best interests on the totality of the circumstances.
Tropea’s companion case, Matter of Browner v. Kenward, was decided in the same opinion at 87 N.Y.2d 727 — citing Browner separately as a different case is an error.
New York has no statewide parenting-plan form. The widely circulated ‘New York Parenting Plan Form’ is a New York COUNTY Supreme Court part form. Treating its terms as New York’s statewide default is wrong.
New York has not enacted UCAPA, and New York’s Penal Law art. 135 custodial-interference offenses are punitive after the fact — they give a worried parent no preventive civil remedy, no risk-factor framework, and no passport relief.
Because New York is a case-law relocation state with no statewide form, everything a client cares about — how many days’ notice before a vacation, whether an itinerary is required, whether the child may leave the country, who keeps the passport between trips — has to be drafted into the order expressly. If it is not in the order, it is not the law in New York.

Sources for this page

Sources we could not reach when this page was built, recorded so you know what is missing rather than assuming it was checked: https://www.nycourts.gov/forms/matrimonial/ParentingPlanForm.pdf – returned HTTP 404 on a rendering fetch and HTTP 403 to a scripted client on both the www and ww2 hosts; its internal text we could not read. Its court caption (‘SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK COUNTY OF NEW YORK – PART’) is reported from the Unified Court System’s own indexed document title, which is why it is characterized here as a county part form rather than a statewide form. Its travel and passport clauses are not described because they we could not verified.

Every fact above is taken from the source linked beside it. Where a figure could not be confirmed from an official source, this page says so rather than printing a plausible number. Found an error? Tell us — it goes on the corrections page with the date.

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Sources last checked30 August 2026
Page published30 August 2026
What this means. This is when the sources on this page were last read against their originals — statutes, court rules, official schedules — taken from the date this page was built from its sources. It is not the date the page was last edited. Adding a link or fixing a typo does not move it; re-reading the statute does. Law changes without notice, so treat anything time-sensitive as needing a fresh check. Where we get something wrong we publish it at thecusp.app/corrections with the date, what changed, and how long the error was live.