Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Utah presumes a standard-of-living equalization for a 10-plus-year marriage where one spouse reduced workplace experience to raise a child, and separately caps total alimony duration at the length of the marriage absent extenuating circumstances.
The rule that changes the answer in Utah
Under Utah Code § 81-4-502(4)(b)(i) and (7)(a): “If a marriage has been in effect for 10 years or more, and if the payee has significantly diminished workplace experience resulting from an agreement between the spouses that the payee reduce the payee’s workplace experience to care for a minor child of the payor, it shall be the rebuttable presumption that the court equalize the parties’ standard of living.”
“Except as provided in Subsection (7)(c), the court may not order alimony for a period of time longer than the length of the marriage.”
What this means for duration
10-plus years of marriage triggers the standard-of-living-equalization presumption under (4)(b)(i); separately, (7)(a) caps alimony duration at the length of the marriage unless (7)(c)’s extenuating-circumstances exception applies.
Why this matters for a later-life divorce
Utah recodified this provision from Title 30 (§ 30-3-5) into Title 81 (§ 81-4-502) effective September 2024; a 2026-session addition, subsection (8), also lets courts aggregate the length of two marriages between the same parties toward this cap for divorced-then-remarried couples whose second divorce is filed on or after January 1, 2026.
Read it yourself
Read the full official text before relying on any figure here. Alimony law is fact-specific and this rule is only one input to a court’s decision, not a guaranteed outcome. This is a source-backed planning guide, not individualized legal advice.
Utah’s human-facing statute page does not carry the statute text itself; the text was extracted from the same official le.utah.gov host’s underlying static PDF (the URL pattern that page itself links to), cross-checked against the immediately prior version of the section to confirm substantive continuity across the 2024 recodification.
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