August 25, 2026 · Updated October 8, 2026
Do I qualify for spousal maintenance in Texas? The §8.051 gates, and why no calculator can answer that
This post explains the eligibility structure the Texas Family Code sets out for spousal maintenance. It is not legal advice, and nothing here is a statement about whether any particular person is eligible. Three of the four statutory paths turn on findings only a court can make. Talk to a Texas family lawyer about your situation. What follows is the statute and the arithmetic.
Texas child support and Texas spousal maintenance look like the same kind of problem and are not. Child support is a formula: net resources in, percentage applied, number out. Ask a calculator and it will answer, because the statute genuinely does the work.
Spousal maintenance is a gate, not a formula. Before any number matters, the requesting spouse has to get through Texas Family Code §8.051, and §8.051 is built out of facts a court finds: a conviction, a disability, a level of care a child requires. Software can tell you which facts the statute names. It cannot tell you whether they are true of your marriage, and any tool that says otherwise is selling you a conclusion it has no basis to reach.
That is the honest answer to “do I qualify.” What a calculator can do is show you the exact shape of the gate, and the ceilings waiting on the other side, because those ceilings are arithmetic and they surprise people.
The short version
- Texas maintenance has one threshold plus four alternative paths. The statute requires the threshold and at least one path. For eligibility, meeting three paths counts the same as meeting one. For duration, the path can matter (see §8.054(b) below).
- The threshold is the part most explainers skip: the requesting spouse must lack sufficient property, including separate property, to provide for their minimum reasonable needs (§8.051).
- Of the four paths, exactly one is checkable without a court: the ten-year marriage path, and even that one has a second prong that is a court finding.
- The caps are ceilings, not entitlements. §8.055 caps the monthly amount at the lesser of $5,000 or 20% of the obligor’s average monthly gross income. Being eligible for maintenance does not mean receiving the cap, or anything near it.
- The §8.054 duration ceilings turn on length of marriage, not on the path, with two exceptions: family violence in a marriage under 10 years (5 years), and the disability and disabled-child paths, where §8.054(b) lets a court continue maintenance for as long as the eligibility continues.
- §8.053 runs a presumption against maintenance on the ten-year-marriage path, and only that path. That is the opposite of what most people assume about long marriages.
The threshold nobody mentions
Every one of the four paths sits behind the same door. §8.051 permits a maintenance order only if the spouse seeking maintenance “will lack sufficient property, including the spouse’s separate property, on dissolution of the marriage to provide for the spouse’s minimum reasonable needs.”
Two things in that sentence do real work.
“Including the spouse’s separate property.” The inquiry is not limited to what the community estate hands over in the divorce. Separate property counts. A requesting spouse who leaves the marriage with inherited assets or premarital property is measured against all of it.
“Minimum reasonable needs.” Not the marital standard of living. Not what is fair. The statute uses a floor, and Texas courts determine that floor case by case on the facts before them. There is no table.
Almost every “am I eligible” explainer online opens with the ten-year marriage rule and never mentions this threshold at all. That ordering is backwards. A twenty-five-year marriage clears the ten-year path and still produces no maintenance order if the requesting spouse leaves with enough property to meet minimum reasonable needs. The paths are alternatives to each other. The threshold is not an alternative to anything.
The four paths
Assume the threshold is satisfied. §8.051 then requires one of the following. The statute lists them in this order: (1), (2)(A), (2)(B), (2)(C). The order is a list, not a ranking.
§8.051(1) family violence
The other spouse was convicted of, or received deferred adjudication for, a criminal offense constituting family violence against the requesting spouse or their child, committed either within two years before the suit was filed or while the suit is pending.
This one is checkable in principle (convictions are records), but the two-year window is a legal determination about filing dates and offense dates, and whether a given offense “constitutes family violence” is itself a finding. A calculator can record that a user reported a conviction. It cannot verify the window.
§8.051(2)(A) the requesting spouse’s disability
The requesting spouse is unable to earn sufficient income to provide for their minimum reasonable needs because of an incapacitating physical or mental disability.
Entirely a court finding. “Incapacitating,” “sufficient income,” and “minimum reasonable needs” are all determinations on evidence.
§8.051(2)(B) the ten-year marriage
The marriage lasted ten years or longer and the requesting spouse lacks the ability to earn sufficient income to provide for their minimum reasonable needs.
This is the path everyone has heard of and the one most often misread, because it is two prongs joined by “and,” and only the first is a date calculation.
Ten years of marriage is not eligibility. It is half of one of four paths, behind a threshold. A spouse married twelve years with full earning capacity has satisfied exactly one prong of one path.
The earning-ability prong is where the real dispute lives, and Texas courts examine it on evidence about work history, education, the job market, and time out of the workforce.
§8.051(2)(C) custodian of a disabled child
The requesting spouse is the custodian of a child of the marriage, of any age, who requires substantial care and personal supervision because of a physical or mental disability, such that the spouse cannot earn sufficient income.
Note “of any age.” This path does not close when the child turns eighteen. It is the one path where an adult child keeps a maintenance claim open, and it is routinely missed.
What our calculator actually does here, and why
This is worth being explicit about, because it explains a design decision that looks like a limitation and is not.
Our Texas engine reports element status across all four paths. It records the path element the user reports, checks the ten-year element against the marriage length entered, and reports which elements are observed. It does not select a path, and it does not output a verdict of “eligible.”
That line is our choice, and it is worth being precise about what the law says and what we decided. Texas Government Code §81.101 defines the practice of law, and §81.101(c) excludes written materials, forms, and computer software from that definition if the products “clearly and conspicuously state that the products are not a substitute for the advice of an attorney.” That is the test in the statute. It does not draw a line between transcribing a user’s information and selecting an outcome. We drew that line ourselves, on top of the disclaimer, because a tool that tells a user they are eligible for maintenance has reached a legal conclusion on facts it cannot verify. So the engine reports observations, and the court decides.
The practical benefit to you is the same: you get an honest picture of which statutory elements your situation touches, without a number that implies a certainty nobody has.
The ceilings, which are arithmetic
Past the gate, the statute stops asking questions and starts imposing limits. These are computable, and they are where expectations usually break.
§8.055 the amount cap
A maintenance order may not require payment of more than the lesser of $5,000 per month or 20% of the obligor’s average monthly gross income.
Worth reading twice: gross income for this cap, not net resources. Texas child support runs on net resources under §154.062; the maintenance cap runs on gross. Different bases, and mixing them is a common error.
The crossover sits at $25,000 of monthly gross income, because 20% of $25,000 is exactly $5,000. Below that, the percentage binds. Above it, the flat cap binds.
| Obligor gross monthly income | 20% of gross | Binding cap |
|---|---|---|
| $4,000 | $800 | $800 (20%) |
| $8,000 | $1,600 | $1,600 (20%) |
| $25,000 | $5,000 | $5,000 (tie; the flat cap is the named ceiling) |
| $40,000 | $8,000 | $5,000 (flat) |
| $100,000 | $20,000 | $5,000 (flat) |
The last row is the one that surprises people. An obligor earning $1.2 million a year faces the same $5,000 monthly maintenance ceiling as one earning $300,000. Texas maintenance does not scale with wealth. This is a policy choice the legislature made, and it makes Texas materially less generous than states with open-ended alimony.
And the cap is a ceiling on what a court may order, not a floor, a target, or an entitlement. Orders below it are ordinary.
§8.054 the duration ceilings
§8.054(a)(1) sets the maximum term by how long the marriage lasted. Apart from one row, the path does not enter into it.
| Marriage length | Applies to | Maximum duration |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 years | Family-violence path (§8.051(1)) only | 5 years (§8.054(a)(1)(A)(i)) |
| At least 10 but not more than 20 years | Any path | 5 years (§8.054(a)(1)(A)(ii)) |
| At least 20 but not more than 30 years | Any path | 7 years (§8.054(a)(1)(B)) |
| 30 years or more | Any path | 10 years (§8.054(a)(1)(C)) |
Family violence is not its own five-year track. The (A)(i) row covers family-violence cases in marriages under 10 years. A family-violence case in a 22-year marriage falls in §8.054(a)(1)(B), 7 years, the same as any other 22-year marriage.
The exception is §8.054(b). For a spouse to whom the disability path (§8.051(2)(A)) or the disabled-child path (§8.051(2)(C)) applies, the court may order maintenance for as long as the spouse continues to satisfy that path’s eligibility criteria. That is permission, not a default term. Under §8.054(c), the court may also order periodic review of that order, on either party’s request or its own motion; review is available, not automatic. (§8.054(a)(1) sets no tier at all for a marriage under 10 years outside the family-violence path, so for those two paths in a short marriage, §8.054(b) is the operative duration rule.)
The 20-year and 30-year boundaries. The statute’s own words overlap at two points. “At least 10 years but not more than 20” and “at least 20 years but not more than 30” both include a marriage of exactly 20 years. “Not more than 30” and “30 years or more” both include a marriage of exactly 30. The statute does not say which tier governs at either point. Our engine shows the longer tier (7 years at exactly 20, 10 years at exactly 30) and labels that result as our reading of an overlap the statute leaves open, not as something the statute settles.
And running underneath all of it, §8.054(a)(2) directs that maintenance be ordered for the shortest reasonable period allowing the requesting spouse to earn sufficient income, unless a disability, the duties of caring for an infant or young child of the marriage, or another compelling impediment substantially or totally diminishes that ability. The ceilings are maximums. The mandate points the other way.
When more than one path applies
The four paths are alternatives for eligibility. Meeting two of them gets a spouse through the gate no further than meeting one. Chapter 8 contains no rule ranking the paths or saying which one “controls” duration, and for most combinations none is needed, because the §8.054(a)(1) ceilings turn on the length of the marriage, not on the path. A family-violence case and a ten-year-marriage case in the same 25-year marriage both carry the 7-year ceiling.
The one thing that changes the ceiling is §8.054(b). If a court finds that the disability path or the disabled-child path applies, it may order maintenance for as long as that eligibility continues, which can run past the marriage-length tier. If the court relies on the ten-year path instead, the tier applies, and so does the §8.053 presumption, which reaches the ten-year path only. Which path a court relies on is the court’s determination.
When inputs touch more than one path, our engine does not pick one. It reports each observed path’s ceiling side by side. Its summary line gives the marriage-length ceiling those paths share and notes when §8.054(b) could extend it.
§8.053: the presumption runs against maintenance on the ten-year path
One more piece, and it is the one that most contradicts the popular understanding of long marriages.
§8.053 establishes a rebuttable presumption that maintenance under §8.051(2)(B), the ten-year-marriage path, is not warranted unless the spouse seeking it has exercised diligence in earning sufficient income to provide for their minimum reasonable needs, or in developing the necessary skills to do so during a period of separation and while the suit is pending.
The presumption reaches the ten-year path and nothing else. Maintenance sought on the family-violence, disability, or disabled-child path carries no §8.053 presumption.
So the structure, end to end: a threshold, then one of four paths, then (on the ten-year path only) a presumption pointing away from an award, then a set of ceilings on what may be ordered. Texas maintenance is a narrow statute, and it was designed that way.
§8.052 then gives the court a list of factors (financial resources, education and employment skills, marriage duration, age and health, contributions as a homemaker, marital misconduct, and others) that shape nature, amount, duration, and manner of payments once eligibility exists. Those factors are not eligibility. They operate after the gate.
Working one all the way through
Twenty-two-year marriage. The requesting spouse has been out of the workforce for eleven years, leaves the divorce with roughly $40,000 in separate property, and reports no disability. The other spouse earns $18,000 per month gross. No family violence, no disabled child.
Threshold. Does $40,000 in property provide for minimum reasonable needs on dissolution? A court decides. It is not obviously enough and not obviously nothing. This is a real dispute, not a formality.
Paths. §8.051(1) not indicated. §8.051(2)(A) not indicated. §8.051(2)(C) not indicated. §8.051(2)(B): the marriage is 22 years, so the first prong is satisfied on the dates; the earning-ability prong is contested and turns on evidence about eleven years out of the workforce.
Presumption. Because the only path in play is the ten-year path, §8.053 applies. It asks what the requesting spouse has done during separation and while the case is pending to earn or to build earning capacity. That record matters here.
Ceilings, if an award is made. 20% of $18,000 is $3,600, which is below $5,000, so the percentage binds and the monthly ceiling is $3,600. A 22-year marriage is at least 20 but not more than 30 years, so §8.054(a)(1)(B) sets the duration ceiling at 7 years. And §8.054(a)(2) still directs the shortest reasonable period.
Notice what this does and does not resolve. Two numbers are certain: $3,600 and 7 years. Both are ceilings. Everything determining whether any award happens at all remains with the court. A tool that collapsed this into a headline eligibility verdict with a dollar figure and a term of years attached would be wrong in the most misleading direction available.
What to take from this
If you came looking for a yes or no, the accurate answer is that the statute does not produce one without findings, and no software has those findings.
What you can take away is the shape:
- The threshold comes first in the statute, ahead of the ten-year rule.
- The statute lists four alternative paths, and three of them turn on findings only a court can make.
- The caps are ceilings ($5,000 or 20% of gross, whichever is less). The duration ceiling turns on length of marriage, except for family violence in a marriage under 10 years and the §8.054(b) disability and disabled-child paths.
- On the ten-year path, and only that path, the §8.053 presumption runs against an award, and diligence is a live issue.
Our Texas calculator includes an optional maintenance screening that reports observed element status across all four §8.051 paths and shows the §8.055 amount cap and the §8.054 ceiling for each observed path, with every statute cited. It reports observations, not a verdict, for the reason set out above.
If eligibility is genuinely in play in your case, that is a conversation with a Texas family lawyer, and the statute is complicated enough to be worth the hour.
Estimate only. Not legal advice. Not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. Statutes verified as of 2026-10-08 against the Texas Family Code, Chapter 8.
Written by The CleanCalc Team · About CleanCalc