Yes, in most cases a cheating spouse can still get alimony. The majority of states don’t consider adultery when deciding spousal support, focusing instead on income, need, and the length of the marriage. A minority of states let judges reduce or deny alimony to a spouse who cheated, and a smaller group can bar it outright when the affair caused the divorce. Wherever you live, money spent on an affair can affect the property split even when it has no effect on alimony itself.
Why Your State’s Approach to Fault Decides Almost Everything
About a third of states give adultery at least some weight in alimony decisions. The other two-thirds look only at financial circumstances. That single question, whether your state treats adultery as relevant, drives the outcome more than any detail about the affair itself.
Even inside the fault group, courts vary in how much weight they actually give infidelity. When one spouse has a stark financial need, especially after a long marriage, judges in many fault states will still award support. The strictest states carve out exceptions when denying alimony would leave someone unable to support themselves.
States That Can Bar or Reduce Alimony for a Cheating Spouse
Roughly eight to ten states allow a court to deny alimony outright to a spouse who committed adultery. Several Southeastern states take the hardest line: if adultery is proven and it caused the divorce, the cheating spouse cannot receive support. In most of these jurisdictions the bar applies only when infidelity was the direct cause of the breakdown, not a symptom of a marriage already failing.
The bar is rarely absolute. Some of these states let a judge award alimony anyway if denying it would be “manifestly unjust,” for example when the cheating spouse is elderly, disabled, or has no realistic path to self-support. Others allow adultery to shrink an award rather than eliminate it, weighed against the requesting spouse’s need, the length of the marriage, and other standard factors.
A second tier of roughly a dozen states treats adultery as one factor among many, never as an automatic bar. Judges can consider it when setting the amount and duration of support, but adultery alone won’t override a clear financial need in a long marriage.
In every fault-relevant state, the spouse alleging adultery has to prove it. Suspicion is not enough. Courts want credible evidence that the affair happened and, in stricter states, that it caused the divorce.
States Where Adultery Has No Effect on Alimony
In the remaining states, courts don’t ask why the marriage ended. Alimony turns on financial factors: each spouse’s income and earning capacity, the marital standard of living, the length of the marriage, and each spouse’s contributions, including homemaking and childcare. Proving your spouse cheated will not change the calculation.
The policy behind this approach is that alimony exists for financial stability, not punishment. Many people find that frustrating, especially when infidelity is the reason they filed. The one indirect way adultery still matters in a no-fault state is when marital money was spent on the affair.
How an Affair Can Still Cost the Cheating Spouse: Dissipation
Dissipation is where infidelity gets financially relevant no matter where you live. It happens when one spouse spends marital money on things unrelated to the marriage, and funding an affair is one of the most common examples. Hotel rooms, gifts, trips with a new partner, meals out: if joint funds or shared savings paid for the relationship, the other spouse may recover that money through property division.
To make a dissipation claim you generally have to show the spending happened after the marriage started breaking down and served no legitimate marital purpose. Once you establish that, the burden usually shifts to the spending spouse to justify the expenditures. If the court agrees, it adjusts the property split and awards a larger share to the innocent spouse to make up for what was wasted.
Dissipation formally affects property division rather than alimony, but the two connect. A spouse who walks away with more assets has a weaker argument for ongoing support. And in states that distinguish “economic fault” (financial mismanagement) from “marital fault” (personal misconduct), dissipation claims can succeed even where adultery itself carries no weight in the alimony analysis.
The Type of Alimony Changes the Analysis
Adultery affects some kinds of support more than others, which matters if you cheated in a fault state and are still asking for help.
- Temporary alimony is paid during the divorce to keep both spouses stable. Courts rarely consider fault here because the purpose is short-term and practical.
- Rehabilitative alimony covers a set period while the lower-earning spouse gains education or job skills. Even in fault states, courts are reluctant to deny it entirely, since cutting off someone’s path to self-sufficiency creates a bigger problem later.
- Permanent alimony is awarded for an indefinite period, usually after long marriages where one spouse cannot realistically become self-supporting. This is where adultery carries the most weight in fault states. Judges are more willing to deny open-ended support to a spouse whose infidelity caused the divorce.
- Reimbursement alimony compensates a spouse who supported the other through school or career advancement. Adultery rarely affects it because it’s based on a specific past contribution, not ongoing need.
If permanent support is off the table, rehabilitative or reimbursement alimony may still be available.
Prenuptial Agreements With Adultery Clauses
Some couples deal with infidelity in advance through a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement. These contracts can impose financial consequences for cheating, often a lump-sum payment or a change to spousal support terms. An agreement might give a spouse who otherwise would receive nothing a right to support if the other cheats. Or it might work the other way, with a support waiver that disappears if the paying spouse has an affair.
Courts generally enforce these clauses when the agreement was signed voluntarily, both parties disclosed their finances, and the terms are not so lopsided that enforcement would be unconscionable. A clause triggering a modest adjustment survives review far more reliably than one demanding a very large payout.
Proving Adultery Without Wrecking Your Case
In a state where adultery affects alimony, you have to prove it. Common evidence includes text messages, emails, social media posts, credit card and bank statements showing unexplained spending, and testimony from people who witnessed the affair. Social media has become especially useful: posts, check-ins, photos, and direct messages can establish both the relationship and the spending tied to it, often more persuasively than what a private investigator produces and at a fraction of the cost.
The Surveillance Trap
How you collect evidence matters as much as what you find. The federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act makes it a crime to intercept someone’s private communications without authorization, and it applies between spouses. Secretly recording phone calls, installing tracking software on a phone, or logging into email or social media accounts without permission can expose you to up to five years in federal prison, civil damages, and the other side’s attorney fees.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 2511 – Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications Prohibited
State recording laws add another layer. Most states let you record a conversation you’re part of, but some require every participant to consent. Recording a conversation between your spouse and someone else, where you aren’t a participant, is illegal virtually everywhere. Even legally obtained evidence can be excluded if a court finds it more prejudicial than probative. Talk to an attorney before you start collecting. A private investigator familiar with your state’s rules can gather admissible evidence without putting your case at risk. Hourly rates for investigators in domestic cases typically run from $60 to $250 or more depending on your area.
When Both Spouses Behaved Badly
Courts sometimes see misconduct on both sides. The cheating spouse’s attorney may point to the other spouse’s own affair, financial fraud, or substance abuse to argue that neither party has the moral high ground. When both spouses contributed to the breakdown, judges in fault states tend to minimize the role of misconduct and fall back on the financial factors. Mutual fault often neutralizes the adultery issue entirely.
Finding Out About an Affair After the Divorce Is Final
Discovering after the fact that your ex had an affair during the marriage generally isn’t enough to reopen an alimony order. Modifications require a substantial change in financial circumstances that wasn’t foreseeable at the time of the divorce, not new evidence of old behavior. The exception is dissipation. If the affair involved marital money that wasn’t accounted for in the original property division, that may support a separate claim to reopen the property portion of the settlement.