Your RSUs Are Marital Property. Here's What Happens to Them in a Divorce.

If you work in Kendall Square, the Seaport, or anywhere along the 128 corridor, a meaningful share of your compensation probably does not arrive as salary. It arrives as restricted stock units on a four-year vesting schedule, or as options you have not exercised, or as a grant that only becomes real if you are still employed in 2029.

People in this position tend to assume that unvested equity is not really theirs yet, and therefore not really anyone else's. That assumption is wrong, and in a divorce it is expensively wrong.

Massachusetts counts what you haven't got yet

The governing statute is M.G.L. c. 208, § 34, which defines the divisible marital estate to include all vested and nonvested benefits, rights and funds.1 Nonvested. The word is in the statute.

The Supreme Judicial Court applied it directly in Baccanti v. Morton in 2001, holding that unvested stock options may be treated as marital assets. The Court reasoned that excluding them could deny a spouse any share in what may be the most valuable asset the couple owns — one to which both may have contributed.2

Twenty-five years later, Baccanti remains the anchor. It supplies what practitioners call the "time rule": the unvested shares are multiplied by a fraction whose numerator is the time the employee held the grant before the marriage ended, and whose denominator is the total period from grant to scheduled vesting. The result is the portion treated as marital.2 A grant issued two years into a four-year vest, with the divorce filed one year later, is roughly half marital — not zero, and not all.

The rule is less mechanical than people think

Here is where it gets interesting, and where recent law matters.

The Baccanti time rule is not a formula a judge is obliged to apply. The SJC framed it as an approach judges may modify, in their broad discretion, to achieve the most equitable apportionment.2 That discretion is real. In October 2025, the Massachusetts Appeals Court in De Felipe v. Suwwan upheld a divorce judgment that divided a husband's equity compensation equally on an "if, as, and when received" basis, rather than applying the time rule at all.3

The lesson for anyone holding equity is not that the law has changed. It is that the law was never as mechanical as the spreadsheet made it look. Two judges in the Suffolk Probate and Family Court, presented with the same grant schedule, can reach different and equally defensible answers — because § 34 hands them a long list of factors and tells them to be fair, not to be arithmetic.1

"Engineers are the worst offenders, and I say that fondly. They build a beautiful model of the vest schedule and forget that the person deciding is not a model — it's a judge with wide discretion and a courtroom full of other people's problems."

— Attorney Julia Rueschemeyer, Boston divorce mediator

Four traps specific to equity comp

1. Pre-tax and post-tax dollars are not the same dollars. $300,000 of RSUs vesting next year is not $300,000. It is that number minus ordinary income tax at vest, and minus whatever the stock does between now and then. Trading it against $300,000 of home equity, or against a Roth balance, is not an even trade — but it is presented as one in settlement conversations every week.

2. "If, as, and when" is not a cop-out. Dividing the proceeds when the shares actually vest — rather than valuing them today — shifts the market risk onto both parties instead of stranding it with one. The De Felipe judgment did exactly this.3 It requires an agreement that survives for years, which is precisely why the drafting matters more than the math.

3. Post-divorce grants are a different animal. Equity granted after the marriage ends, for work performed after the marriage ends, is generally not marital. But grants issued during the marriage that vest afterward sit in contested territory, and the question of what the grant was for — past performance, retention, or future services — does real work in the analysis.2

4. Equity is income, too. Vesting shares can be counted in support calculations, not merely divided as property. The Massachusetts Child Support Guidelines that took effect December 1, 2025 raised the maximum combined parental income used in the calculation from $400,000 to $450,000 — a threshold two equity-compensated Boston professionals cross without effort.4 The Guidelines also define income broadly and expressly reach emerging asset types.4

Why these cases settle better than they litigate

Equity compensation is the paradigm case for negotiated resolution, for an unglamorous reason: the uncertainty is enormous, and litigation does not reduce it. It converts it into a judge's discretionary answer, arrived at expensively, after both sides have paid experts to value something whose value nobody knows.

The comparative research on divorce process favors negotiation. A meta-analysis in Conflict Resolution Quarterly pooling direct comparisons of mediated and litigated divorces found a small-to-moderate advantage for mediation across process satisfaction, outcome satisfaction, and the parties' ongoing relationship.5 And the conversation is protected: under Massachusetts law, communications made in mediation before a qualified mediator are confidential and not subject to disclosure in a judicial proceeding6 — which means you can put a candid valuation on the table without it becoming an exhibit.

Couples in the Boston area with meaningful equity increasingly work through vesting schedules, tax basis, and "if, as, and when" language in structured sessions with a neutral. Practitioners such as a Boston divorce mediator handle these grants routinely, because in this market they are no longer exotic.

The one thing you should not do is assume that because you cannot sell it yet, it is not on the table. Section 34 says otherwise, in writing.

Endnotes

1.

Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 208, § 34.

2. Baccanti v. Morton, 434 Mass. 787 (2001).

3. De Felipe v. Suwwan, 106 Mass. App. Ct. 158 (2025); see also Boston Bar Association, "De Felipe v. Suwwan: Placing the Emphasis on Equity in the Division of Equity Compensation," Boston Bar Journal.

4. Massachusetts Trial Court, 2025 Child Support Guidelines (effective December 1, 2025), Mass.gov.

5. Shaw, L. A. (2010). Divorce mediation outcome research: A meta-analysis. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 27(4), 447–467.

6. Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 233, § 23C.

About the expert quoted: Julia Rueschemeyer is a Massachusetts attorney and divorce mediator whose practice includes couples in the Boston area with equity compensation, retirement assets, and closely held business interests.