Humu Yansané spent nearly three years twisting in legal limbo after she first filed for child support in 2016. While her case crawled through family court, she juggled bills, stared down an eviction notice and tried to keep her household afloat without the support she was seeking.
Her ordeal is far from unique. A new statewide analysis finds that parents who file for child support in New York City wait roughly three times as long for an order as parents in the rest of the state. Across the five boroughs, the average time to get an order was about 10.5 months, compared with roughly 3.5 months outside the city.
Report Pulls Back The Curtain On Family Courts
Those findings come from a report by Her Justice, which analyzed anonymized Office of Court Administration data from 2019 and 2022. The study says there were more than 130,000 child support filings in 2025, about 30% of all family court filings that year, and that more than 90% of parents in those cases appeared without legal counsel. Her Justice also warned the dataset was incomplete: roughly 17% of cases were still open when records were provided, which could affect the averages.
Why The Delays Persist
Advocates point to a perfect storm of problems: pandemic backlogs, high case volumes and confusing paperwork that routinely trips up parents who show up without lawyers. “The longer a child support case takes, the longer a family waits for what is typically critical financial support,” Rachel Braunstein, senior director of policy at Her Justice, told Gothamist. The Office of Court Administration did not immediately respond to inquiries, Gothamist reported.
Where The System Is Getting Faster
The analysis by Her Justice found that average times to obtain a child support order fell across all five boroughs between 2022 and 2025, with Brooklyn showing the biggest shift. There, the wait dropped from about 18.1 months in 2022 to roughly 4.3 months in 2025. The report credits a 2025 triage pilot in Brooklyn that steers low-conflict cases toward quicker settlement pathways, and notes the program later expanded to courts in Queens and the Bronx. Her Justice cautioned that the improvement is preliminary because some 2025 cases were not yet closed when the organization received the records.
Legislators Push An Expedited Option
To formalize those faster tracks, lawmakers advanced Assembly Bill A3531, which would authorize expedited settlement conferences for parents who voluntarily agree to that process. The bill, introduced in January 2025 and now in committee, allows courts to hold virtual expedited conferences where resources permit and specifically excludes paternity disputes, unrepresented minor parents, orders of protection and cases that include spousal support.
Lives On The Line
For parents like Yansané, every extra month without an order can mean falling behind on rent, missing payments and scrambling for childcare, with financial setbacks rippling through an entire household. She told Gothamist she went into debt, briefly received public benefits and had to negotiate a payment plan with her landlord while the case moved through court.
Advocates say the early gains from triage and settlement tracks are promising but far from a cure-all. They want courts, lawmakers and funders to pair those procedural tweaks with more legal help for the people actually standing before the judge. City & State reported the triage pilots and the representation gap, noting that more than 90% of parents in these cases lack counsel, and Her Justice says it will continue pushing for reforms while seeking the remainder of the 2025 records to confirm whether the apparent speedup is real and lasting.
