Mississippi Courts Must Now Start From Equal Parenting Time.

What should a family court assume on day one of a custody case?

Until now, Mississippi judges built a custody arrangement from scratch, weighing best-interest factors with no starting default either way. HB1662 changes the starting point. Courts must now presume that joint custody with equally shared parenting time is best for the child. A judge who orders something else has to explain why.

This is a presumption, not a mandate. It can be rebutted by a preponderance of the evidence, and the law carries strong carve-outs: family violence, sex offenders, incarcerated parents, and other best-interest factors all remain grounds to depart from the equal-time default. It applies only to new custody orders going forward, not to arrangements already in place.

Supporters point to research behind the shift. A 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Family Psychology examined 60 studies and found children in joint physical custody had significantly better emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes than children in sole custody. Mississippi becomes the sixth state to adopt this kind of presumption.

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges has raised a real concern: presumptive joint-custody laws can complicate safety planning in domestic-violence cases, where a rigid default might not account for who actually provided most of a child's care before separation. Mississippi's law answers part of that concern directly, the family-violence and sex-offender carve-outs aren't afterthoughts, they're built into the presumption itself. Whether they function cleanly in the hardest cases, the ones where a parent alleges abuse a court hasn't yet adjudicated, is something that plays out case by case, not something the statute alone can settle.

There's a second honest note to name plainly: shifting to an equal-time default also changes how child support gets calculated. That's not a hidden cost. It's a direct consequence of the same shift that makes this a genuine parental-rights and fathers-rights win for the parents it's meant to help.

Rep. Shane Aguirre carried HB1662 through the House, a Senate amendment, and a conference committee before Governor Reeves signed it April 8, 2026, effective July 1.

Mississippi flipped the default in custody cases from a blank slate to equal parenting time, and built real safeguards around the exceptions. The law's actual test comes case by case, starting with the first contested custody filing after July 1.

This is our read of the law. We encourage you to read it yourself and reach your own conclusions.