Military Divorce · Virginia

The Military Allowances That Can Change Your Support Calculation

By Corrie Sirkin, Esq. · Founding Partner

A servicemember looks at a leave and earnings statement and sees base pay near the top, then a stack of allowances below it for housing and food. A natural assumption follows: those allowances are not really salary, so they should not count for support. In Virginia, that assumption is usually wrong, and getting it wrong can throw off a child or spousal support number badly.

What BAH and BAS are

The Basic Allowance for Housing, called BAH, is money that helps a servicemember pay for housing when they do not live in government quarters. The Basic Allowance for Subsistence, called BAS, helps cover food. Both are paid on top of base pay, and both are generally free from federal income tax, which is why they feel different from a paycheck.

That tax-free quality is exactly what leads people to leave them out of support math. But Virginia does not ask whether income is taxed. It asks whether it is income, and these allowances put real money in the servicemember's pocket every month.

Why Virginia counts them

Virginia calculates child support from each parent's gross income, and the statute defines gross income broadly to capture the actual resources a person has available. Courts here generally include military allowances like BAH and BAS in that figure, because excluding them would understate what the servicemember truly earns and shortchange the children or the former spouse.

Because these allowances are tax free, some courts even consider that a dollar of BAH can be worth more than a taxed dollar of wages, since it is not reduced by withholding. The practical effect is that leaving allowances out can lower a support number well below what the law intends. For how Virginia builds a child support figure, see our child support page.

Getting the income figure right

The fix is simple in concept and easy to botch in practice: build the support calculation on total compensation, base pay plus allowances, not base pay alone. We read the leave and earnings statement line by line so nothing real is left out and nothing is double counted. For the federal rules that ride along with a military case, see our military divorce page, and for the Virginia divorce process overall, our divorce practice page.

"Virginia does not ask whether the money is taxed. It asks whether it is income."

Corrie Sirkin, Esq. Founding Partner

Honest counsel: read the LES line by line

The single most common support error I see in military cases is a number built on base pay alone, with the allowances quietly dropped. Sometimes that is an honest oversight, and sometimes it is not. Either way it produces a support figure that does not reflect what the family actually has to live on. So we read the leave and earnings statement carefully, allowance by allowance, and we build the calculation on the real total. That is not aggressive lawyering. It is just accurate math, and accurate math protects the children and the lower earning spouse.

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