Separated parents, child arrangements, parental or individual scale?

When you open Pandora's box, you never know what you're going to get. Family tax law is complex. Extremely complex. 16 different scenarios for two parents and one (or more) child(ren). Married, not married, living together or separately, shared or exclusive custody, with or without joint parental authority, with or without maintenance contributions.

In this case, the taxpayer was fighting to obtain the parental scale, or at least a half-parental scale.

Federal judges considered it «unlikely» to assign a tax scale to each parent taxed separately, for fear of creating unequal treatment compared to married couples who benefited from the tax scale because their taxable elements were added together (unlike separated and divorced parents who each filed their own tax return).

The taxpayer has not «demonstrated, with facts and figures, that she is herself discriminated against».

Federal judges have recalled that, in the case of (i) joint parental authority, (ii) with equivalent shared custody, (iii) without maintenance contributions, and (iv) equal assumption of child maintenance, the lower-earning separated/divorced parent is considered to be substantially contributing to the child's maintenance and therefore benefits from the parental tariff (for both (i) the federal tax and (ii) the cantonal and communal tax under harmonised cantonal law) – while the higher-earning parent is taxed under the individual tariff.

The judgment is in French. It concerns a Neuchâtel case. The judgment must be read in conjunction with judgment 9C_404/2023 concerning the ex-husband – who lost his case before the Federal Tribunal.

TF, judgment 9C_397/2023, of 7 March 2025