Arizona Parenting Time Guidelines: Schedules, Safety, and Changes

The Arizona parenting time guidelines are model schedules published by the Arizona Supreme Court to help separating parents divide time with their children by age and circumstance. They are a planning tool, not a statute, and no court-ordered schedule can override the state’s overriding standard: the best interests of the child under A.R.S. 25-403. Arizona law does not presume equal parenting time, but it does require that children have substantial, frequent, and continuing contact with both parents whenever that contact is safe.¹

What the Guidelines Are, and What They Aren’t

The document most people mean is “Planning for Parenting Time: Arizona’s Guide for Parents Living Apart,” produced by a statewide committee of judges, mental health professionals, and attorneys and published by the Arizona Supreme Court’s Court Services Division.² The guide is explicit that it is not the law. It sets no minimum or maximum time, and parents and judges remain free to build a different arrangement.

What the guide does give you is a menu. Judges and mediators across Arizona reach for these model plans as a starting point when parents can’t agree, and lawyers use them to frame proposals. The plans are organized by the child’s age, and within each age group they range from limited daytime visits to equal overnight time. Which plan fits depends on the child’s bond with each parent, each parent’s caregiving experience, the distance between homes, and how well the parents can cooperate.

How a Judge Actually Picks a Schedule

Every parenting time dispute in Arizona runs through A.R.S. 25-403, which lists eleven factors a judge must weigh. In a contested case, the judge has to make findings on the record about each relevant factor.³ The factors most likely to move the outcome:

Each parent’s past, present, and likely future relationship with the child.
How well the child has adjusted to their current home, school, and community.
Which parent is more likely to encourage frequent, meaningful contact with the other.
The child’s own wishes, if the child is old enough and mature enough.
The mental and physical health of everyone involved.
Any history of domestic violence or child abuse.

Two of these catch parents off guard. Badmouthing the other parent or obstructing their contact damages your case under the cooperation factor. So does misleading the court to cause delay or run up costs. Judges remember that kind of behavior.³

Schedules for Babies and Toddlers

Infants live by “out of sight, out of mind.” They need to see both parents often to keep attachment alive, but they also need short separations and steady routines. The guide offers six plans for children from birth to age two.²

Plans 1 through 3 are daytime-only. They fit situations where one parent has done most of the caregiving, a parent has limited experience with the child, or work schedules cut into available time. Plan 1 gives the less-involved parent three visits of three to five hours each week, spread across the week.⁴

Plans 4 through 6 add overnights. They assume both parents have been actively caregiving, know how to handle nighttime routines, live close enough to avoid long trips, and can communicate. Plan 6, the most generous option for infants, produces roughly equal time with no stretch longer than two consecutive days away from either parent.²

For ages two to five, the plans build on the infant framework by adding consecutive overnights and longer blocks as the child’s tolerance grows. The guide recommends that children between two and three not be separated from either parent for more than three consecutive days on a regular basis.² By ages three to five, structured time away from each parent becomes healthy, and schedules begin to resemble the equal-time rotations used at school age.

Equal-Time Schedules for School-Age Children

Once children are in school, both the model plans and the courts lean harder toward schedules that give each parent close to equal time. Two arrangements do most of the work.

Alternating Weeks

Seven consecutive days with one parent, then seven with the other. It works best when both parents live in the same school district and the child can handle a full week without seeing the other parent. The tradeoff is real: a week is a long stretch for a younger child, and midweek contact is minimal unless the plan builds it in.

The 5-2-2-5 Schedule

Neither parent goes more than five days without the child. One parent takes Monday and Tuesday, the other takes Wednesday and Thursday, and the parents alternate the Friday-through-Sunday weekend. Over two weeks the time balances out. Exchanges happen more often, so this schedule rewards parents who live close together and can hand off without conflict.

A common variant is the 2-2-3 rotation: two days with each parent, then three days with whichever parent has that week’s weekend. Courts are generally flexible about the exact pattern as long as it serves the child.

Holidays and School Breaks

Holiday schedules override the regular rotation. For Thanksgiving, winter break, and spring break, the standard approach alternates years: one parent gets a given holiday in even-numbered years, the other in odd-numbered years.

Precision matters more than parents expect. Your plan should set exact start and end times, not just a day. “Christmas” means different things in different households, so the plan needs to say whether it runs from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day at noon, from Christmas morning through December 26, or something else. Summer break is usually split into extended blocks. Birthday time often lets the child spend part of the day with whichever parent doesn’t otherwise have that day.

What Your Parenting Plan Must Include

A.R.S. 25-403.02 requires every parenting plan to cover eight areas, and a court will reject one that leaves any of them out.⁵

Whether legal decision-making is joint or sole.
Each parent’s rights and duties for personal care and decisions about education, healthcare, and religious upbringing.
A practical parenting time calendar, including holidays and school vacations.
Where exchanges happen and who handles transportation.
A dispute resolution method for handling disagreements, proposed changes, and alleged violations, which can include mediation or private counseling.
A process for periodic review of the plan.
How the parents will communicate about the child, including method and frequency.
A statement that each parent has read and will follow Arizona’s relocation notice requirements.

Exchange procedures are where plans most often fail in practice. “Parents will meet at a reasonable location” invites arguments. Name a specific place, assign transportation clearly, and address what happens when a parent is late or misses an exchange.

When Safety Changes the Schedule

Courts depart from standard schedules when a child’s safety demands it. The two most common triggers each carry a statutory presumption that shifts the burden onto the offending parent.

Domestic Violence

If the court finds that a parent committed an act of domestic violence against the other parent, a rebuttable presumption applies that granting that parent sole or joint legal decision-making is contrary to the child’s best interests.⁶ Where the violence has been significant, or there is a significant history of it, joint legal decision-making is off the table. To overcome the presumption on parenting time, the parent has to show that time with the child will not endanger the child or harm the child’s emotional development, typically by completing a batterer’s prevention program, substance abuse counseling if relevant, and parenting classes, with no further acts of violence.

Substance Abuse

If a parent has abused drugs or alcohol, or was convicted of a drug offense or DUI within the twelve months before the case was filed, a rebuttable presumption applies against giving that parent sole or joint legal decision-making. The court must also specifically find that any parenting time it orders adequately protects the child.⁷ Overcoming the presumption typically requires no additional drug convictions in the past five years and clean results from six months of random drug testing at a state-approved facility.

Supervised Time

When outright denial of contact would be too extreme but risk remains, a court can order supervised visits. A neutral third party stays within sight and hearing of the parent and child throughout, and they are never left alone. As the parent shows safe behavior, restrictions can ease from fully supervised visits in an institutional setting, to partially supervised, and eventually to unsupervised time.

Changing the Schedule Later

Arizona imposes a one-year waiting period after a legal decision-making or parenting time order is entered before you can file a motion to modify it.⁸ Three exceptions let you file sooner:

An affidavit showing the child’s current environment may seriously endanger their physical, mental, or emotional health.
Evidence that domestic violence or child abuse has occurred since a joint legal decision-making order was entered, which allows a modification request at any time.
Six months after a joint legal decision-making order, a petition based on the other parent’s failure to follow its terms.

Situations Parents Often Assume the Guidelines Cover

A few adjacent rules sit outside the model schedules but shape how they work in practice.

Relocation. If you share legal decision-making or parenting time and both parents live in Arizona, you cannot move the child more than 100 miles within the state or out of state at all without giving the other parent at least 45 days’ written notice by certified mail.⁹ The other parent has 30 days to file a petition to block the move.

Military deployment. A court cannot enter a final modification order while a parent is deployed and must wait until at least 90 days after deployment ends, unless the deploying parent agrees. Deployment alone cannot be treated as a substantial change in circumstances, and on request the court must enter a temporary order adjusting parenting time during the deployment.⁸

Tax credit. The schedule you negotiate has tax consequences. The IRS treats the parent with whom the child lived for more than half the tax year as the custodial parent, and only the custodial parent can claim the child tax credit by default.¹⁰ In a true 50/50 schedule with equal overnights, the IRS treats the higher-earning parent as custodial. The custodial parent can sign IRS Form 8332 to release the claim for one or more years, and can later revoke it.¹¹ If your plan says nothing about the credit, the default rules take over based on overnights.

1
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.01 – Sole and Joint Legal Decision-Making; Parenting Time
2
University of Arizona Law. Parenting Time Plans – Arizona’s Guide for Parents Living Apart
3
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403 – Legal Decision-Making; Best Interests of Child
4
AZCourtHelp.org. Parenting Time Schedule – Plan 1
5
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.02 – Parenting Plans; Joint Legal Decision-Making
6
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.03 – Domestic Violence and Child Abuse
7
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-403.04 – Substance Abuse
8
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-411 – Modification of Legal Decision-Making or Parenting Time
9
Arizona Legislature. Arizona Code 25-408 – Rights of Each Parent; Parenting Time; Relocation of Child
10
Internal Revenue Service. Child Tax Credit
11
Internal Revenue Service. About Form 8332 – Release/Revocation of Release of Claim to Exemption for Child by Custodial Parent