Legal landscape note: This article was originally published in 2018 and was reviewed and updated for republication in July 2026. New Jersey law changes frequently.
Your spouse earns most of the household income, and you are weighing a divorce. The first question is usually not about custody or who keeps the house. It is about next month: the mortgage, the utilities, the grocery bill, and how any of it gets paid once the case is filed. In New Jersey, the answer while the case is pending is pendente lite support.
That short-term budget is also a record of how the household actually functioned. Automatic payments, irregular expenses, children's activities, insurance, and access to joint accounts can matter as much as the obvious monthly bills. Reconstructing them after accounts have changed is harder than collecting them before the motion is prepared.
Pendente lite is Latin for "pending the litigation." Under New Jersey Court Rule 5:5-4, the Family Part can order temporary relief while the divorce works its way to a final judgment: temporary spousal support, temporary child support, exclusive use of the marital home, restraints on spending down marital assets, and contribution toward counsel fees. The point of the order is to hold the financial status quo in place so the spouse who earns less is not starved out of the case before it is decided.
You do not wait for the divorce to finish. Your attorney files a pendente lite motion with the court, supported by a Case Information Statement -- the sworn, line-by-line budget New Jersey requires with every support motion. The CIS sets out your income, your spouse's income, and the marital lifestyle: housing, insurance, transportation, the children's expenses, all of it, backed by pay stubs, tax returns, and bills.
The numbers matter more than the rhetoric. Judges decide pendente lite motions largely on the papers, so the figures in your CIS have to match the documents behind them. An inflated budget is not only an ethics problem; it is a strategy problem. A number you cannot document at the motion stage will be used against you at trial, and courts rarely allow a second bite at the apple. Ask the court for what you actually need, and prove it.
One point stands apart. If you are staying in the marriage because you cannot afford to leave and the relationship is abusive, money is not the first problem to solve -- safety is. Get yourself and your children somewhere safe and seek help immediately; New Jersey's domestic violence laws provide their own emergency remedies, separate from the divorce.
A pendente lite order is temporary. It can be revisited while the case is pending, and it is replaced by the final judgment of divorce. But it often frames the later alimony and child support discussion, which is another reason to get the first application right.
If you are weighing a divorce and worried about how you will cover the bills while it is pending, collect the Case Information Statement materials before filing: income records, tax returns, housing costs, insurance, transportation, and the children's expenses.
Arrange those materials by recurring expense, current payment source, and any amount already in dispute. A divorce review can then distinguish the immediate request for stability from the longer-term questions of alimony, child support, and property division.