AllLaw State Child-Support Guideline Scraper

Scrapes AllLaw.com child-support guideline pages for all 50 US states and Washington D.C. Returns the guideline model (income shares, percentage of income, or Melson formula), a narrative summary, calculator inputs, factors considered, statutory references, and the last-updated date — one record per state.

What it does

AllLaw publishes a canonical consumer reference for child-support guidelines in every US jurisdiction. Each state page contains:

• The computational model used (income shares vs percentage of income vs Melson formula)
• A narrative explanation of how support is calculated
• The inputs the state calculator collects (number of children, parenting time, income amounts, healthcare costs, etc.)
• Factors the court considers when setting or modifying support
• Statutory citations where present

The actor crawls the hub page at /calculators/childsupport/ to discover all state URLs, then returns a structured record for each state's guidelines.

Output

Each output record contains:

Field	Type	Description
state	string	US state name (e.g. California, Texas, Washington D.C.)
url	string	Canonical source URL
guideline_model	string	Income shares / Percentage of income / Melson formula
guideline_summary	string	Narrative summary (first ~1200 chars of article body)
calculator_inputs	array	Field labels the state calculator collects
factors_considered	array	Factors the court considers (income, healthcare, custody, etc.)
statutory_references	array	Cited statutes and rule numbers where present
last_updated	string	ISO-8601 date the article was last modified
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 timestamp when the record was scraped

Use cases

• Family-law SaaS and legal research tools — structured per-state guideline model for support estimator tooling
• LLM fine-tuning and RAG pipelines — state-specific child-support computation rules as structured context
• Policy research — compare guideline models, income thresholds, and factors across all 50 states + DC
• Fintech alimony/support estimators — drop-in dataset for child-support calculators

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
maxItems	integer	10	Maximum number of state pages to scrape (max 50: all 50 states + DC)

Notes

• Fast, low-cost runs.
• The actor discovers all 50 state URLs from the hub page automatically. Set maxItems to 50 to get all states.
• Guideline model detection uses keyword analysis of the full article text. A small number of states may return an empty guideline_model if the page does not explicitly name the formula.
• Last-updated dates come from JSON-LD dateModified metadata — most pages were updated in 2024.