What an Alabama divorce actually costs to file.

Open questions on this page

• No effective date could be confirmed for § 12-19-71. The Code of Alabama record gives no effective date and no supersession date; the only dating information is the amendment history ‘(Acts 1975, No. 1205 … Act 2019-405, §1; Act 2024-449, §1.)’, from which no effective date was inferred.
• Twenty-four of Alabama’s 67 counties publish no domestic relations filing figure at all: Choctaw, Clarke, Cleburne, Colbert, Conecuh, Covington, Crenshaw, Dale, Franklin, Geneva, Hale, Henry, Jackson, Lauderdale, Limestone, Marengo, Randolph, Russell, Sumter, Talladega, Tallapoosa, Tuscaloosa, Washington and Winston. Tuscaloosa says so outright. For those 24 the honest answer is that we do not know what the counter charges, and the $192 – $324 range is the range across the 43 that do publish, not across the state.
• County websites are the wrong place to look, and that cost us a run. Alabama’s circuit clerks are state Unified Judicial System employees, so the county government sites – jccal.org, mobilecountyal.gov, madisoncountyal.gov, mc-ala.org – carry no circuit court fee page, and two of them return HTTP 403. The fee schedules live on each circuit court’s own site on the judiciary’s domain, <county>.alacourt.gov. An earlier version of this page concluded from the county sites that no Alabama county published a total. That was wrong: 43 do.
• Those alacourt.gov sites answer a request for a page that does not exist with a 302 redirect to their own home page, which can read as a successful fetch. We probed that deliberately with a nonsense path before trusting any figure, and every figure above was read from a page that returned 200 at its own URL.
• Form C-56, the Administrative Office of Courts’ Fee Distribution Chart, is dated after all, and it is old. It is published per county, and the copies carry ‘Form C-56 / Effective: 10/1/2011’ on the face of page one – Franklin County’s, for instance. An earlier version of this page said the chart carried no printed date; it does. Being dated 2011 also makes it stale against a statute amended in 2015, 2019 and 2024, so it is not used for any figure above. It is quoted only for the sentence it prints about how the system works – ‘The docket fees are uniform throughout the state, except in those counties where additional court costs are authorized by local act’ – and for the statutory distribution, which still reconciles with § 12-19-72(6).
• Form C-56 is an accounting distribution chart, not a price list. Its ‘total’ column is what the clerk books and splits between funds, which is why Franklin’s reads $149.00 against a $145.00 statutory docket fee. We do not treat a line on that chart as the price of anything.
• Mobile County’s local add-ons were assembled from three separate Title 45 sections (§ 45-49-82, § 45-49-82.01, § 45-49-82.03); a fourth section, § 45-49-82.02, adds $25 but only ‘in all cases … which are determined by the judge to be domestic violence cases’ and so was excluded from the divorce figure.
• Still unverified: the cost of a court-ordered mediation. Alabama publishes no statewide mediation rate and we found no county that prints one; Cullman’s circuit court publishes a long explanation of divorce mediation with no figure in it. A catchline search of Title 30 returned no mediation section.
• Also unverified: what the required parenting class costs in the three counties that require one. The courts name the certificate but not the provider’s price.
• Alabama’s local acts are county-specific and there are 67 counties. Only Jefferson, Mobile and Madison were traced through Title 45, so the true statewide range of statutory add-ons is almost certainly wider than $3-$100. This does not affect the figures above, which are what the courts publish rather than what the local acts reconstruct to.
• In no county does the statutory docket fee plus the local add-ons we could trace equal the figure the court publishes. Mobile reconstructs to $159.00 and publishes $208.00; Madison reconstructs to $245.00 and publishes $324.00; Jefferson reconstructs to $148.00 and publishes $199.00. Something else is inside those totals that Alabama does not itemise anywhere we could find. Pay the published figure.
• Transparency note on method: the Alabama Code section pages at alison.legislature.state.al.us render their text with JavaScript, so the statutory text quoted above was read from that same official site’s own public GraphQL data endpoint (alison.legislature.state.al.us/graphql), which serves the identical content the page displays. No login, paywall or bot challenge was involved. The source links on this page go to the readable page for each section, and all of them load.
• Sources we could not read: https://www.madisoncountyal.gov/ – HTTP 403 on the county site and on /departments/circuit-clerk. Not bypassed. (The Madison County figure now comes from the Twenty-Third Circuit Court’s own family division page at madison.alacourt.gov, which publishes $324.00.); https://www.mc-ala.org/ (Montgomery County) – HTTP 403.

We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what Alabama’s own agencies publish, not an omission on our part.