Parents who separate across two countries ask what the amount will be. The prior question — the one that decides the amount — is which country's law a Montenegrin court will actually apply, because the answer changes with where the claim is filed, and one common tactical choice reverses it.
Article numbers below come from two texts, both read on 5 September 2026. Family-law provisions are from the consolidated text of the Porodični zakon (chain: "Službeni list RCG" 001/07 of 09.01.2007, "Službeni list CG" 053/16 of 11.08.2016 and 076/20 of 28.07.2020), in a consolidation stamped 2023; we did not locate any later amending act, and if one has been enacted since 2020 the numbering below has to be re-checked. Conflict-of-law provisions are from the Zakon o međunarodnom privatnom pravu, announced text "Službeni list CG" 1/2014 (later 6/2014, 11/2014, 14/2014 and 47/2015), with the article numbers used here cross-checked against a second published copy. This is general information, not advice on a particular file.
The amount is not at large — two provisions fence it in
Most published commentary says Montenegrin maintenance is "at the court's discretion" and stops there. That is half true: the court assesses the facts, but the statute puts a floor under the award and a band around one method of calculating it.
Article 272(1) sets the frame — the obligation is fixed in proportion to the obligor's means, within the limits of the creditor's needs. Article 272(2) adds the floor: the total sum of means needed for maintenance may not be lower than the permanent cash social assistance payable, under the social-protection rules, to a person with no income at all in the municipality where the maintained person is resident. The floor is therefore not a figure in the Family Act; it tracks that municipality's social-welfare rate and moves when the rate moves.
Article 281 governs how the future obligation is expressed:
| Provision | What it fixes |
|---|---|
| Article 281(1) | Future maintenance is ordered in fixed monthly sums |
| Article 281(2) | If the obligor has regular monthly receipts, the court sets future amounts as a percentage of salary, pension or other permanent receipt — on the creditor's request |
| Article 281(3) | A percentage award may as a rule be neither less than 15% nor more than 50% of those regular monthly receipts |
| Article 281(4) | Where the creditor is a child, the amount should secure for the child at least the standard of living the obligor parent enjoys |
Two consequences follow in a cross-border file. The percentage method has to be asked for — Article 281(2) makes it conditional on the creditor's request, and a creditor who does not ask gets a fixed sum that inflation and salary growth do not touch. And the 15–50% band is expressed as a rule rather than an absolute, so it anchors the argument without foreclosing it.
Article 273 lists what the court weighs: the creditor's property situation, capacity for work, employment prospects and health; for a child, additionally age and educational needs; and on the obligor's side all receipts, the real capacity to earn, their own needs and their other statutory maintenance obligations. The reference to earning capacity rather than declared income is why a self-employed obligor's tax return is a starting point rather than an answer.
Article 274 is the provision foreign clients find least intuitive: in a dispute between parents about child maintenance, the court counts the daily care and work of the parent the child lives with as that parent's contribution. The caring parent is not treated as contributing nothing merely because no money moves.
Who owes what to whom
The duty is not confined to minor children:
- Article 254(1) — parents must maintain their children. Article 254(2) extends the duty past majority where the child has not finished schooling, for the duration of that schooling, and where schooling has been extended for justified reasons, at the latest until the age of 26.
- Article 255 — an adult child unfit for work through illness or disability, without sufficient means, is maintained for as long as that state lasts.
- Article 256 — a parent deprived of parental rights is not released from the duty to maintain.
- Articles 257 to 261 — the duty also runs upwards to parents and outwards to stepfamily, siblings and blood relatives in the direct line, who are called in the order in which they would inherit on intestacy, with the burden divided according to means.
- Article 284 — maintenance from a spouse or cohabiting partner ranks ahead of maintenance from relatives, and where several people need maintenance at once, the child's right takes priority.
The clocks on spousal and partner maintenance
Adult maintenance carries deadlines that a divorce settlement negotiated abroad routinely misses.
Article 262(1) gives a spouse without sufficient means, who is unfit for work or cannot find employment, a claim against the other spouse in proportion to that spouse's means. Article 262(2) lets the court refuse it where the claimant behaved grossly or improperly in the marriage without serious cause, abandoned the other spouse maliciously or without justified reason, or where the claim would be a manifest injustice.
Article 263(2) is the trap. A spouse who did not ask for maintenance in the divorce proceedings may bring a separate action within one year of the divorce, and only if the preconditions arose before the divorce and continued without interruption until the close of the main hearing — or if incapacity for work arose within that year from an injury or health impairment dating from before the divorce. Article 263(3) moves the start of that year where the spouses agreed on maintenance or one in fact supported the other: it then runs from the last payment made, or from the day the spouse's property was returned.
Article 266 ends the right when the conditions fall away, when the period expires, or when the recipient remarries or enters a cohabiting union — and adds a rule with no way back: a right to maintenance that has once ended cannot be re-acquired from the same spouse.
Article 268(2) gives an ex-cohabitant the same claim on the Article 262(1) conditions, but the action must be brought within one year of the end of the shared life. Article 271 is separate and often overlooked: irrespective of whether the parents ever lived together, the father must contribute to the mother's maintenance for three months before the birth and one year after it.
The waiver clause that does nothing
Article 253(3) states it in one line: a renunciation of the right to maintenance has no legal effect. A settlement in which one parent gives up child maintenance in exchange for something else — the flat, a lump sum, a clean break — does not extinguish the claim under Montenegrin law. The conflict rules reinforce it: Article 95(4) of the Private International Law Act refers the question whether a creditor may renounce maintenance to the law of the creditor's habitual residence at the time of the choice, so a waiver written into a foreign agreement is tested against that law, not against the law the agreement chose for itself.
Which law applies — the cascade, and the choice that reverses it
Montenegro has taken the cascade familiar from the Hague maintenance instruments and written it into its own statute, so it operates whether or not any convention is engaged:
| Rule | Applicable law |
|---|---|
| Article 90(1) — general rule | Law of the creditor's habitual residence |
| Article 90(2) — creditor moves | Law of the new habitual residence, from the moment of the change |
| Article 91(2) — creditor cannot obtain maintenance under that law | Law of the forum |
| Article 91(3) — creditor sues in the debtor's habitual residence state | Law of that state; and if the creditor cannot obtain maintenance there, the creditor's habitual residence law |
| Article 91(4) — still nothing | Law of their common nationality, if there is one |
| Article 92 — spouses and former spouses | Article 90 disapplied on a party's objection where another law, especially that of the last common habitual residence, is more closely connected with the marriage |
Article 91(1) confines the special rules in Article 91 to three relationships: parents towards their children, persons other than parents towards people under 21 (excluding the obligations covered by Article 92), and children towards their parents. Article 93 gives the debtor a defence in the remaining cases — outside parent-to-child duties and outside Article 92 — that neither the law of the debtor's habitual residence nor the law of any common nationality provides for such an obligation at all.
The practical point is Article 91(3), and it catches a sensible-looking tactical decision. A parent abroad whose ex-partner and assets are in Montenegro often files here because this is where enforcement will happen — and filing in the debtor's habitual residence state switches the applicable law from the creditor's home law to Montenegrin law. That may help or hurt, but it should be a decision rather than a by-product.
One more provision closes the loop. Article 4(2), point 4 of the Private International Law Act excludes renvoi for maintenance obligations: where the cascade points at a foreign law, the substantive rules of that law apply, and its conflict rules cannot bounce the question back to Montenegro or on to a third state. Maintenance is one of six matters on that list, and it is the reason the cascade above is the end of the analysis rather than the start of one.
What the parties can agree, and what they cannot
Article 94 allows a choice of the law of the forum, expressly and for one particular set of proceedings only; if made before proceedings begin it must be written and signed, or recorded so its content can be retrieved later. Article 95(1) allows a broader choice at any time, from a closed menu: the law of a state of which either party is a national at the time of the choice; either party's habitual residence law at that time; the law chosen for, or in fact applied to, their property relations; or the law chosen for, or in fact applied to, their divorce or separation.
Two limits then bite hard. Article 95(3) disapplies that choice entirely for maintenance owed to a person under 18, or to an adult who by reason of personal incapacity cannot protect their own interests — so a choice-of-law clause in a parental agreement does not govern child maintenance. And Article 95(5) lets the court disregard the chosen law where applying it would produce manifestly unfair or unreasonable consequences for either party, unless both were fully informed of the consequences when they chose.
Article 97 then defines what the applicable law decides — whether, to what extent and from whom maintenance may be claimed, how far it may be claimed retroactively, the basis for the amount and its indexation, who may bring the proceedings, and limitation periods. Article 98 overrides all of it on one point: the creditor's needs and the debtor's means, and any compensation received instead of periodic payments, are taken into account even where the applicable law provides otherwise.
Which Montenegrin court, and how the money is actually collected
Article 134 gives a Montenegrin court jurisdiction where the defendant is habitually resident here, where the creditor is habitually resident here, or where maintenance is decided within Montenegrin proceedings on status relations or parental care. Article 130(2) confirms the last route from the other side — jurisdiction over the marriage carries maintenance, parental care and matrimonial property with it — and Article 130(3) applies the same to a cohabiting union.
Collection is where the Family Act does something unusual. Article 275(1) empowers the guardianship authority to bring and conduct the maintenance action in the child's own name where the parent the child lives with fails to do so without justified reason; Article 275(2) goes further and has that authority file the enforcement motion itself if the parent does not. Article 276 requires every maintenance decision to be sent to it, and Article 277 obliges it to keep a record of maintained children and obligors and to work towards adjustment when needs or means change.
Article 282 adds an interim route: where a parent ordered to pay does not perform regularly, the guardianship authority — on the other parent's proposal or of its own motion — takes measures to secure temporary maintenance for the child under the social and child-protection rules until the parent resumes performance. Article 283 lets anyone who has borne another person's maintenance costs sue for reimbursement, with several obligors liable jointly and severally up to their means. And Article 280 keeps every award open: either side may ask the court to increase, reduce or terminate it if the circumstances on which it rested have since changed.
Before you sign the parenting agreement
The provisions that decide these files are not the ones people negotiate over. A maintenance waiver has no effect under Article 253(3). A choice-of-law clause does not reach child maintenance at all under Article 95(3). Filing where the assets are can change the governing law under Article 91(3). And the one-year clocks in Articles 263(2) and 268(2) run whether or not anyone has noticed them.
If a maintenance question in your file touches Montenegro — because a parent lives here, a child lives here, or the income that would fund the payments is earned here — send us the draft agreement or the foreign order, with where each parent and the child are habitually resident and when the separation happened. We will identify which limb of the cascade in Articles 90 to 95 applies, whether a deadline is already running, and what the Article 272(2) floor and the Article 281(3) band mean for the number under discussion. How the property side is decided separately is set out in divorce and property division; which court may hear the divorce itself, and whether a foreign decree will be recognised, in cross-border divorce and Montenegro; the limits of contracting in advance in what makes a bračni ugovor hold; and how we approach these files in our family law practice.
