2-2-3, 2-2-5-5, alternating weeks: the custody schedules, explained

An overnight is where the child sleeps. It is the unit every one of these patterns is built from, and the unit that matters legally: the label on an arrangement, most child-support formulas, and often which parent the school treats as primary all key off the number of nights, not the number of hours. A parenting plan that says "days" almost always means the night at the end of the day.

A cycle is how long the pattern runs before it repeats — seven nights or fourteen for everything below. This is why parenting time is quoted per cycle rather than per month: a month is not a whole number of fortnights, so the same schedule "measures" differently depending on which month you counted.

A hand-over is a change of house. It is the part parents underestimate. Four hand-overs a week is four opportunities for a forgotten coat, a late pickup, and a conversation in a car park neither parent wanted to have. Fewer hand-overs is not automatically better — it buys longer separations — but the trade is the real decision.

2-2-3. A fortnight: two nights with one parent, two with the other, then a three-night weekend, and the second week mirrors the first so the weekends alternate. Nobody goes more than three nights without seeing the children. It costs the most hand-overs of any pattern here, and the weekdays move around, so the child is not with the same parent on the same night each week.

2-2-5-5. Also written 5-5-2-2 or 5-2-2-5, which is the same fortnight started at a different point — a common source of confusion when two people think they are describing different schedules. One parent always has Monday and Tuesday, the other always Wednesday and Thursday, and the weekends alternate as five-night blocks. Even split, fixed weekdays, and a routine that is easy for a school and a child to hold.

3-4-4-3. Three nights, four nights, four nights, three nights across a fortnight. Even, with only two hand-overs a week, and each parent gets a long weekend every other week.

Alternating weeks. A full week each, one hand-over a week. The lowest-friction pattern to run and the longest separation on this list: seven nights. Many families soften it with a midweek dinner or overnight, which is when the arrangement stops being exactly 50/50 and starts being something you should count properly.

4-3. Four nights with one parent, three with the other, every week. About 57/43, and on the usual arrangement the same parent has every weekend, which is a bigger difference in practice than the three-night gap suggests.

Every other weekend. Friday and Saturday nights, every second weekend: about 14 percent of the nights, and still the starting point many court orders default to. Stretched to Friday, Saturday and Sunday — the child goes to school from the other house on Monday — it is about 21 percent.

Every other weekend plus a midweek night. The same alternating weekend with a Wednesday overnight added each week: about 29 percent, and no gap longer than a week. It is the usual first step away from the traditional default, and often the one that does the most for a child's relationship with the non-resident parent for the least disruption.

Younger children generally do better with shorter blocks, because their sense of how long five nights is does not match an adult's. Under about three, that argues for frequent short contact; primary age, for 2-2-3 or 2-2-5-5; secondary age, often for alternating weeks, because teenagers value not living out of a bag more than they value symmetry.

Distance decides more than anything else. Patterns with midweek hand-overs assume both homes are inside one school run. If they are not, 2-2-3 is not a schedule, it is a commute, and the every-other-weekend family — with a longer block in the holidays to balance it — is the honest choice.

School is the third constraint. A pattern with fixed weekdays, like 2-2-5-5, means the parent who does Wednesday always does Wednesday's homework and always talks to that teacher. A pattern with moving weekdays spreads that around, which is fairer and harder to keep in one head.

Whatever you choose, the holiday schedule is a separate document and it overrides. A fortnight that divides evenly can end up well away from even once a summer block, an alternating Christmas and each parent's birthday weekend are written in — so count the holidays too, rather than assuming the ordinary pattern's percentage is the year's.

A pattern written in a message thread is a pattern two people will remember differently by March. The Co-parenting app treats the schedule as a record instead: once both parents have joined, each child's standing schedule takes effect only after both countersign it, every agreed version is kept, and the version history shows what was agreed and when each version was superseded.

One-off swaps — the Thursday you need to move for a wedding — go through the same countersign, and their terms are frozen server-side at the moment both parents approve, so what was agreed cannot be edited afterwards by either side.

It offers every pattern named in this guide by name, and anything else — a six-day rotation, a schedule built around shift work — as a day-by-day cycle you enter once and, once both have joined, both parents sign. Custody days are then worked out on the server from what was agreed and flow to the shared calendar and Today view, so the children and both parents can see where they are without asking.

Be sure which "every other weekend" you are agreeing to. The phrase is used for both the two-night and the three-night shape, and the gap between them is half again as many overnights — so the app writes the nights into the name, and so does the calculator: "Every other weekend (Fri–Sat, 2 nights)" and "Alternating weekends (Fri–Sun, 3 nights)" are two different arrangements, not two ways of saying one.

The schedule lives in a co-parenting space that sits between two private households. Each parent keeps their own home, their own calendar and their own finances; the space holds the schedule, the kids' expenses, the shared records and messages that cannot be edited or deleted, and nothing else crosses between the two homes.

• Co-Parenting
• Calendar
• Family Records
• Packing Lists

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. Install the ones this guide uses and skip the rest.

• The co-parenting apps compared, by what each is for
• What information should co-parents share, and what should remain private?
• Splitting the kids' expenses between two households without fighting