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Child support cases see citywide speed up
A new Her Justice report examined how the New York City Family Court system has used a new program to work through its case backlog.
Brooklyn Family Court Judge Lee Elkins poses with "Pink Stink" by Christian Garcia at an art show in his courtroom on January 25, 2011. Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images
A 2025 family court pilot program in New York City may have significantly sped up wait times for child support orders throughout the five boroughs, a new report by the legal services nonprofit Her Justice found.
A Brooklyn parent seeking a court order for child support in 2022 had to wait an average of 18 months to obtain the order. But by 2025, courts ordered support in an average of 4.3 months – shaving more than a year off the time, in the backed-up family court system.
The report analyzed nearly 800,000 of the state’s anonymized child support filings from 2019 and from 2022 to 2025. And while support cases have gotten resolved faster across the state, the most dramatic improvement was in Brooklyn, which first launched a new triage process for cases halfway through the year.
Triage helps streamline the process for families who are not in conflict about the available income for children and don’t require extensive litigation, which “creates an opportunity for families who agree on support and want to reach settlements to reach an agreement that day,” Rachel Braunstein, the senior director of policy at Her Justice, told City & State. “And then they're on their way instead of being in court for two plus years.”
The program was later expanded to family courts in Queens and The Bronx, which also saw improved disposition times. The Her Justice report notes that the results are “promising,” but incomplete, since there were still open 2025 cases when the data was obtained.
The COVID-19 pandemic added enormous strain to the court system’s case backlog, with criminal and civil cases dragging on even years after the pandemic. Family courts in New York City were hit especially hard, with some courts closing for child support filings in 2020 and 2021 and leaving many families with limited or no access to the court.
There were more than 130,000 child support filings in 2025, making up 30% of all family court filings – and, according to the report, over 90% of the parents involved in those cases do not have legal representation.
“Critical need is in child support being addressed by the child support courts. And at the same time, it's a huge burden,” Braunstein said. “We think the trends shown in our analysis are quite promising, and we understand that the courts think this intervention of the triage pilots with a settlement component is very promising.”