Texas · Standard Possession Order (1st / 3rd / 5th weekends)
Standard Possession Order (1st / 3rd / 5th weekends) in Texas
Texas's statutory default: the first, third, and fifth weekends of each month with the non-primary parent, plus Thursday evenings and a long summer block. In Texas this is written into a Parenting Plan, where time with a child is called possession and access.
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The rotation
| Week | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | A | A | A | B | B | A |
| 2 | A | A | A | A | A | A | A |
| 3 | A | A | A | A | B | B | A |
| 4 | A | A | A | A | A | A | A |
What Texas expects
Texas vocabulary is unlike any other state: parents are 'conservators' (usually Joint Managing Conservators), time is 'possession and access', and the statutory default is the Standard Possession Order — commonly 1st/3rd/5th weekends. Plans are written as the SPO, an Expanded SPO, or an agreed variation.
Governing law: Tex. Fam. Code § 153.252 (Standard Possession Order).
The honest trade-off
Its advantage is that it's the default: a court will order it without argument, and every Texas family lawyer knows it cold. Counting weekends by ordinal rather than alternating means the non-primary parent occasionally gets two weekends in a row (the fifth, then the first). The Expanded Standard Possession Order stretches each period from Thursday to Monday, moving it toward 45/55.