70/30 Custody Schedule
Seven nights with one parent, three with the other, on a ten-day loop. The ratio is exact; the weekdays refuse to stay put.
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The repeating cycle, day by day
| Days 1 to 7 | Day 1A | Day 2A | Day 3A | Day 4A | Day 5A | Day 6A | Day 7A |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Days 8 to 10 | Day 8B | Day 9B | Day 10B |
This pattern is commonly described as a 70/30 split. That figure comes from counting the overnights in the cycle above. It is the pattern's own arithmetic, not a legal standard, and no state requires this or any other rotation.
How a 10-day cycle behaves
The template is one long block and one short one: parent A keeps the child seven nights, parent B takes the next three, and the loop restarts. Ten nights, a 70/30 division with no rounding at all.
Here is the catch. Ten is not a multiple of seven, so every turn of the loop starts three weekdays later than the last. A block that begins on a Friday begins on a Monday next time, then a Thursday, then a Sunday. The calendar only realigns after seven full cycles, seventy days.
That drift is why the pure version is rare during the school year. Parent B’s three nights sometimes cover a weekend and sometimes sit midweek, and neither household can promise the child a stable weekly rhythm.
Two situations tolerate the drift well: summers and other no-school stretches, and work lives that already run on rotations rather than weeks, where the parenting cycle can mirror the job’s own clock.
Many plans that call themselves 70/30 quietly use a different template underneath, such as an every-weekend base with added blocks, or an alternating-weekend fortnight plus summer weeks. The name describes a target ratio, and several roads lead there.
Deciding whether the pure cycle fits
The school test comes first. A rotation that wanders across weekdays will collide with any fixed timetable, so school-year families usually keep the 70/30 ratio but pin the blocks to the week, accepting a slightly different count in exchange for stability.
The three-night block deserves its own look. It is long enough for a real visit yet short enough that parent B never runs a full school-week routine, so the imbalance in this pattern is about texture as much as time.
Distance changes the calculus. With homes an hour or more apart, longer and rarer blocks beat frequent short ones, and drift matters less because exchanges are scarce: two per cycle, about 73 in a year.
When this pattern tends to fit
- Summers and preschool years, when weekday drift costs nothing
- Work lives already running on non-weekly rotations
- Distance that favors long blocks over frequent handoffs
Honest downsides
- The cycle collides with any fixed weekly commitment
- Parent B waits through a seven-night gap every cycle
- Most school-year 70/30 orders end up rebuilt around the week
Overnights over a year
Cycle arithmetic: 7 plus 3 is 10, an exact 70/30. A year holds 36.5 cycles, so about 255.5 nights for parent A and 109.5 for parent B; a real calendar rounds each to a whole night.
Exchanges: two per cycle, about 73 a year. Weekday alignment repeats every 70 days.
See it on real dates
Open the custody schedule generator and choose the 70/30 schedule to lay the cycle over an actual calendar, starting from any anchor date. To turn the rotation into a yearly overnight count for a support formula, use the parenting time calculator.
70/30 schedule FAQs
How many nights is a 70/30 schedule in a year?
The ten-day loop gives parent A 7 of every 10 nights, about 255 a year, and parent B about 110. The division is exactly 70/30 by construction, which few of the named patterns can claim.
Why does the 70/30 schedule drift across the week?
Ten days is one week plus three days, so each new cycle starts three weekdays after the previous one did. Weekends fall inside parent B’s block on some turns and miss it entirely on others. Only a cycle length divisible by seven holds its weekdays still.
How do families keep a 70/30 ratio without the drift?
By trading exactness for stability. A weekly every-weekend shape delivers 71/29. An alternating-weekend base plus a slice of school vacations averages near 70/30 across the year. Both keep weekdays fixed and let the yearly count, rather than the cycle, hit the target.
Does a 70/30 split matter for child support?
In states whose formulas count overnights, the difference between roughly 110 nights and a higher or lower figure can change the calculation. The parenting time calculator on this site turns any cycle into the yearly count a state page can work with.
About the numbers on this page
Custody schedule patterns are scheduling conventions used by families, mediators, and courts. They are not law. No statute mandates any rotation on this page, and no agency publishes an official version of them, so this page cites no statutes. Every count and percentage above comes from the pattern's own cycle, which you can verify against the day-by-day table. For how a state's support formula treats parenting time, see that state's page on this site.
Reviewed by SupportDecode Editorial Team Page content reviewed Sources Methodology Update log
Changelog: page first published as part of the custody schedule library. Material changes are dated in the update log.