What it costs to file for divorce, in every state.
We read the statutes and the clerks’ own fee schedules for all fifty states. Here is what we found, including the places where nobody publishes an answer at all.
Every figure on this page is traced to a statute, a state court system, or a clerk’s published fee schedule — and linked to it. Not a law firm’s blog, not a legal-forms company, not an aggregator. Where a state publishes nothing, we say so instead of estimating.
A filing fee is not what a divorce costs. It is the entry ticket. Service of process, a parenting class you may be required to take, court-ordered mediation, and a card surcharge all sit on top of it — and in several states one of those costs more than the filing fee itself. Maine’s filing fee is $120; its court-connected mediation is $160 for the first two sessions. Each state page below itemises what the fee does not cover.
All fifty states
The across counties column carries a range for the nine states that set filing fees locally rather than statewide. In those nine the state figure is a starting point, not an answer: Pennsylvania runs from $93 in Potter County to $398 in Bucks for a plain divorce — a wider spread than exists between most states. These are the plain-filing figures, with no children and nothing added. Several counties charge substantially more once children or extra counts are involved — Dauphin County, Pennsylvania reaches $854 — and those figures are on each state’s own page. Every number was read off that county clerk’s own published schedule. Several other states also let counties add their own charges — their rows say varies locally, not yet mapped, which means exactly that: we have not confirmed those county by county, and we are not going to imply we have.
Click a state for the full breakdown, the source links, what the fee excludes, and how a fee waiver works there.
| State | To file | Across counties | How it’s set | What’s actually published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | $145 – $245 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $145.00 statutory docket fee (the Administrative Office of Courts charts the collected total as $147.00, the extra $2.00 being the DNA database fee); county local-act add-ons raise it further, to as much as $245.00 in Madison County |
| Alaska | $250 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $250.00 |
| Arizona | $261 – $436 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $261 – $436 |
| Arkansas | $165 – $185 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $165.00 to $185.00 — $165.00 is the base filing fee published by county circuit clerks, and counties on the statewide e-filing system publish $185.00, which they state includes a $20.00 electronic filing system fee |
| California | $435 – $450 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $435.00 – $450.00 |
| Colorado | $260 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $260.00 |
| Connecticut | $360 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $360.00 |
| Delaware | $175 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $175.00 — the $165.00 ‘Civil Filing – Divorce’ cost plus the $10.00 Court Security Assessment, which the schedule’s page-3 list expressly applies to a PETITION FOR DIVORCE |
| Florida | $397.50 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $397.50 at filing + $10.50 at final judgment ($408.00 total) |
| Georgia | $218 – $220 | $211.50 – $220Upson to Gwinnett · plain filing | Set locally | $218.00 – $220.00 |
| Hawaii | $215 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $215.00 in statutory charges ($265.00 where either party has a minor child) – summed by us from the statute, because Hawaii publishes no combined total |
| Idaho | $207 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $207.00 |
| Illinois | Varies locally | $306 – $388Champaign to Cook · plain filing | Set locally | Statutory maximum $371.00 in a county of 3,000,000 or more (Cook); statutory maximum $321.00 in every other county. Actual confirmed county example: $314.00 (Madison). |
| Indiana | $157 – $177 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $157.00 – $177.00 |
| Iowa | $285 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $285.00 |
| Kansas | $173 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $173.00 |
| Kentucky | Not published | $228 – $253Hopkins to Scott · plain filing | Set locally | no figure published by the state |
| Louisiana | Varies locally | $150 – $475East Baton Rouge Parish to West Baton Rouge Parish · advance deposit | Set locally | No statewide figure exists. Verified parish advance deposits for a divorce filing: East Baton Rouge Family Court $150.00 (no service) / $240.00 (one service); Orleans Parish $337.50; Jefferson Parish $400.00 (acceptance of service, no rules) / $500.00 (one service) / $600.00 (with a rule, or rule plus TRO). |
| Maine | $120 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $120.00 |
| Maryland | $165 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $165.00 |
| Massachusetts | $215 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $215.00 |
| Michigan | $175 – $255 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $175 – $255 |
| Minnesota | $340 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $340.00 |
| Mississippi | $163 | $148 – $153Clay to Harrison · plain filing | Set locally | $163.00 contested / $168.00 uncontested-joint (Harrison County) |
| Missouri | $132.50 – $197.50 | $97.50 – $177.50Buchanan to City of St. Louis · plain filing | Set locally | $132.50 – $197.50 |
| Montana | $170 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $170.00 |
| Nebraska | $200 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $200.00 |
| Nevada | $284 – $299 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $284.00–$299.00 (Clark County/Las Vegas $299.00; Washoe County/Reno $284.00) |
| New Hampshire | $280 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $280.00 without minor children / $282.00 with minor children or parenting matters |
| New Jersey | $300 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $300.00 |
| New Mexico | $137 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $137.00 |
| New York | $210 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $210.00 (index number only) – $335.00 (index number + RJI + note of issue) |
| North Carolina | $225 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $225.00 |
| North Dakota | $160 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $160.00 |
| Ohio | $200 – $475 | $200 – $385Cuyahoga to Delaware · plain filing | Set locally | $200 – $475 |
| Oklahoma | $236 – $246 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $236.00 statewide; up to $246.00 where the county has adopted the courthouse-security assessment |
| Oregon | $301 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $301.00 |
| Pennsylvania | $250 – $334.73 | $93 – $398Potter to Bucks · plain filing | Set locally | $250.00 – $334.73 across the three counties confirmed |
| Rhode Island | $120 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $120.00 statutory entry fee; $140.75 total when filing electronically |
| South Carolina | $150 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $150.00 |
| South Dakota | $97 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $97.00 |
| Tennessee | $234.50 – $431.50 | $234.50 – $356.50Davidson to Shelby · plain filing | Set locally | $234.50 – $431.50 |
| Texas | $350 – $401 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $350.00 – $401.00 |
| Utah | $350 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $350.00 |
| Vermont | $90 – $295 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $90.00 – $295.00 (three published tiers) |
| Virginia | $83 – $94 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $83.00 – $94.00 depending on the circuit court |
| Washington | $364 | Varies locally — not yet mapped | State base + local | $364.00 |
| West Virginia | $135 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $135.00 |
| Wisconsin | $184.50 – $194.50 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $184.50 – $194.50 |
| Wyoming | $160 | Set statewide | Same statewide | $160.00 |
Three things the numbers above hide
A published fee can be a ceiling, not a price
Florida’s statute says the clerk may charge “up to” $295 for the base fee. Illinois sets statutory maximums by county population tier. In both, a clerk charging less is following the law, not making a mistake — which is why the posted number differs county to county in states whose fee is supposedly uniform.
Some of it isn’t due when you file
Florida collects $397.50 at filing and another $10.50 only when the judge signs the final judgment. Montana charges the responding spouse $60 to appear and the prevailing party $50 at entry of judgment. North Dakota charges the responding spouse $100 to file an answer. A single “filing fee” number quietly compresses two or three separate moments of paying.
Almost every state will let you file without paying, and almost nobody asks
The mechanism has different names — in forma pauperis, a poverty affidavit, an affidavit of indigency, a fee waiver application — but it exists in nearly every state, it is decided on a form rather than at a hearing in many of them, and it often covers service of process too. South Dakota’s waiver covers the sheriff’s service fee; North Dakota’s explicitly does not. Each state page says which.
How we built this
Fifty states, read one at a time from primary sources: statutes on state legislature servers, judiciary fee schedules, and county clerk fee pages. Where two official sources disagreed we said so rather than picking one — Iowa’s judiciary says $285 while the published Code text still says $265, and the explanation is a publication lag, not a contradiction.
Several states actively resist being read. Hawaii’s entire judiciary website returns a blanket refusal to automated requests; we found the statute on the Legislature’s alternate host instead. Kentucky’s fee schedule genuinely is not published — the Administrative Office of the Courts keeps it in an internal accounting manual, and the state’s own public guide tells filers to phone their circuit clerk. Georgia and Mississippi publish their statutes only through a commercial portal that serves no readable text.
Court fees change without announcement, and most fee schedules carry no date at all. Confirm with your clerk before you write the check.
What people actually report paying
Everything above is the filing fee, traced to the statute. It is also the smallest number in a divorce. Here is the other side of it — and a warning about how to read it.
We read hundreds of public accounts from people who have been through it. Three findings held up across nearly all of them:
- The total is bimodal, not an average. Self-filers cluster around $300–$500. Anyone with two lawyers and a real disagreement clusters around $20,000–$30,000. Almost nobody reports the middle, so “the average divorce costs X” describes almost no actual divorce.
- Cost is driven by the other person’s conduct, not by how complicated your assets are. People with millions who agreed to split evenly reported paying filing fees only. People with one house and one child reported $45,000 because the case got dragged out.
- Every large surprise is a third professional. The guardian ad litem, the custody evaluator, the forensic accountant, the QDRO preparer — all billed separately from both lawyers, and often introduced by the court before anyone had budgeted for one.
These are anecdotes, not prices. People post about a divorce cost when the number shocked them, so the high figures are heavily over-represented and the ordinary divorce is nearly invisible. Every figure on the full page is labeled with how many people reported it.
See what people report paying →Know someone in every state staring at this number?
A straight answer about money is more useful than most advice, and it costs nothing to pass along. Nothing here asks for their real name, and nobody finds out they looked.
Then there’s everything after the filing fee
Forms, deadlines, residency rules and what happens to the house — one kit per state.
Or find someone to help
Attorneys, mediators, CDFAs and therapists in all 50 states, credentials checked against official state records. Nobody paid to be there.