How to count overnights (the right way)
Overnights — not hours, not days — are the unit courts and support guidelines use. Counting them correctly is arithmetic, and it's worth getting exactly right.
An overnight is where the child sleeps
An overnight is one night the child spends in a parent's care. It's about where the child sleeps, not the number of hours: a long day that ends with the child going back to the other parent's home to sleep usually is not an overnight for the parent who had the day.
This is why two schedules that 'feel' similar in daytime contact can produce very different overnight counts — and why the count, not a sense of how much time each parent spends, is what matters.
Count the whole cycle, then annualize
Custody schedules repeat on a cycle — a week, two weeks, four weeks. Count the overnights for each parent across one full cycle, then annualize: a two-week rotation repeats about 26 times a year, a four-week rotation about 13.
Then remember the honest gap: holidays, school breaks, and summer usually override the regular rotation, so the real annual count can differ from a schedule's headline number. Our parenting-time calculator counts from your actual A/B pattern, and the schedule pages show the base split before holidays move it.
Count your overnights
The arithmetic part — counting overnights from your actual pattern — is something we can help with. The money is your state's to calculate.
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