Updated September 3, 2026. Quick answer: Texas ties baseline maintenance eligibility to a 10-year marriage-length threshold: outside that (or a family-violence, disability, or custodial exception), a spouse is not eligible for court-ordered maintenance at all.
The rule that changes the answer in Texas
Under Tex. Fam. Code § 8.051(2)(B): “has been married to the other spouse for 10 years or longer and lacks the ability to earn sufficient income to provide for the spouse’s minimum reasonable needs”
What this means for duration
10 years of marriage is the eligibility line under § 8.051(2)(B); the other eligibility paths (family-violence conviction, incapacitating disability, or custodial responsibility for a disabled child) do not require it.
Why this matters for a later-life divorce
A marriage well past 10 years clears this eligibility gate on duration alone, which is not true for a shorter marriage without one of the other three qualifying conditions.
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.
Texas’s human-facing statute page (statutes.capitol.texas.gov) does not carry the statute text itself; the actual text was retrieved from the Texas Legislative Council’s own backend content-service API (tcss.legis.texas.gov) that the same official site’s JS app itself calls, an official government source, not a third party.
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