Are there stats on things like the following:
% of divorces where alimony is awarded
Average time term of alimony
Gender ratio of recipients (male vs female recipients)
Odds of alimony for heterosexual vs homosexual couples
Alimony amounts (% of income, raw dollars, etc).
Does anyone know the answers or know where I could find them?
According to this article which links to 2010 US census reports for references, only 3% of men received alimony (12,000 male compared to 380,000 female).
That would make it 98% of all divorces, which may have some rounding error.
I wouldn’t have guessed that high.
That 3% is obviously wrong (see Ruken’s post). I suspect it means that only 3% of people getting alimony are men.
If you look at the source of the 380,000, you will see that 4.4m women are getting child support. This suggests that fewer than 10% of divorced women get alimony. You cannot just divide one number by the other as child benefit can last longer than alimony (and vice versa) and childless women will not get child benefit but might get alimony.
Yes that’s what I meant, sorry. Of people receiving alimony, only 3% are men by the math at HuffPost.
In my personal situation, I paid spousal maintenance (they don’t call it alimony in Washington State) for a couple of years to my ex-wife but I’m paying child support until our daughter turns 18. In this state usually the maintenance is intended to support you long enough to find a job and otherwise adjust to not depending on a spouse for income.
Thanks for the info so far. I’m wondering what the the lengths are or if it varies by state. Two years or lifetime, etc.
Also has alimony among divorced gay couples been studied?
And because child support is awarded in non-marital cases as well as divorces, while alimony/maintenance is generally only a divorce thing.
There have been highly publicized cases of never-married people who had no children together requesting, and getting, “palimony”. These were people who were involved in LTRs with prominent entertainers or professional athletes.
I did say generally. 
I’m sure parentage cases (child support without marriage) are a lot more common than palimony cases.
I thought I had read that generally (esp. maybe in Canada) alimony was a thing of the past. Women as well as men were expected to go out and support themselves to the best of their abilities. Most cases women are NOT expected to not work for the rest of their lives… that was more a 1950’s-type attitude. Typical exception might be the woman who has spent 30 years or more as the stay-at-home mother may have such limited prospects that alimony would be expected; or an extremely high income for the working spouse (typically the husband).
Of course, with the current pension-splitting as a common part of the divorce settlement (pretty much legally mandated in Canada, IIRC) that provides for any old age concerns. I assume the same applies to retirement savings plans like 401K?
While not strictly a by divorce rate, since they might be receiving alimony from previous years that’s 392k receiving alimony compared to 872k divorces and annulments in 2010 (CDC cite).
If the only people receiving alimony that year had ended their marriage during the year it’s still a touch under 45%. That’s obviously a weak assumption but it lets us at least estimate a cap on the maximum rate of alimony awards.
Another reason why many (usually) women don’t even ask for alimony in the first place is because it is taxable income. Child support is not.
I know a few divorce cases where the woman was awarded support. In each case, it was a situation where she had put off school to work while her husband either finished some kind of graduate program or got established professionally, and the support was long enough for her to be able to go to either college (or just finish) or grad school. In two cases, there was an oral agreement that this was going to happen in the course of the marriage, and in one case the ex-husband didn’t even object. He knew he wouldn’t have gotten through law school and established in practice as quickly or as well as he did without her working full-time, and helping shmues clients by hosting dinners and such.
So support lasted in those cases 2-4 years. In one case, the woman still had to supplement her income.
Probably knowing lots of university people biases what I’m exposed to, and there are other examples, maybe even a few unfair ones, but in those cases, I think the ruling for support was fair and deserved.
In cases where a woman has been home with children for say, a decade, she’s not going to be able to go right back to the workforce with a lot of earning power. She may have to work part-time and even do volunteer work just to get together a resume, and support for a year or two while she does that, especially support that may not amount to her full expenses, just something supplemental, is fair. Also, if there is a very young child involved, and both parents want one parent available as a full-time SAHP for that child, then the other parent is going to have to provide support for the one who is at home. I personally only know of one case where that happened, and it was a high-earning man who dumped his wife after five kids, including one special-needs kid, and one still in diapers. He wanted her to be able to be at home with them, and he even moved out of the house, but continued to pay the mortgage and all the expenses.
In the last case, I had to wonder what he left for, especially since he didn’t remarry or seem to be with anyone else right away, but it wasn’t my business, so I didn’t ask.