What a Kansas divorce actually costs to file.
Not a range, not an estimate, not a lawyer’s blog. Every figure below is traced to a statute, a court fee schedule, or a clerk’s own published page — and linked to it.
See a different stateKansas
It costs $195.00 to file for divorce in Kansas. Below is where that money goes, what it does not cover, and what to do if you do not have it.
How this figure is put together
Kansas charges one docket fee for every Chapter 60 civil case, and a divorce is one of those. K.S.A. 60-2001(a) sets that docket fee at $173 and separately lets the Supreme Court add a non-judicial-personnel charge of up to $22 on top of it. The Kansas Judicial Branch’s ‘District Court Filing Fees’ table publishes the divorce total as $195.00 and says its amounts already include the surcharge; Johnson County adds $1.50 and Sedgwick County $2.00. That surcharge authority was renewed in 2026. It had been written to run “on and after July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2025”; the 2026 Legislature struck both dates and the section now reads “on and after July 1, 2026, through June 30, 2030” — 2026 House Bill 2393, § 18, enacted as L. 2026, ch. 35 and effective 1 July 2026. Sedgwick County’s own docket fee chart shows the same arithmetic from the clerk’s side: a domestic case at a $175.00 docket fee — the statutory $173 plus Sedgwick’s own $2.00 law library charge — and a $22.00 surcharge, $197.00 in all.
Worth knowing before you file. Only $173 of the $195.00 is the docket fee the Legislature set. The other $22 is a non-judicial-personnel surcharge the Supreme Court is allowed to add on top, and that permission has an expiry date written into the statute — it now runs to 30 June 2030, having been renewed by the 2026 Legislature with effect from 1 July 2026. It is the part of this number most likely to move, and it moves by legislation rather than by notice to anyone filing.
The short version6 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes — Kansas charges one docket fee that covers every chapter 60 civil case; there is no divorce-specific fee and no published breakdown.
- What the filing fee does not cover — The filing fee is usually the smallest predictable number in a divorce.
- If you cannot afford to file — More people qualify than apply.
- What we could not find out
- How we know this — Where nothing is published, we leave it blank.
- What people actually report paying — Here is the other side of it — and a warning about how to read it.
In this subject 6
Where the money goes
The short version6 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes — Kansas charges one docket fee that covers every chapter 60 civil case; there is no divorce-specific fee and no published breakdown.
- What the filing fee does not cover — The filing fee is usually the smallest predictable number in a divorce.
- If you cannot afford to file — More people qualify than apply.
- What we could not find out
- How we know this — Where nothing is published, we leave it blank.
- What people actually report paying — Here is the other side of it — and a warning about how to read it.
In this subject 6
Kansas does not break this down
Kansas charges one docket fee that covers every chapter 60 civil case; there is no divorce-specific fee and no published breakdown.
What the filing fee does not cover
The filing fee is usually the smallest predictable number in a divorce. This is where the rest of the budget lives — and where “not published” appears most often.
What it costs to file it electronically
- If you pay by card
- Per the Douglas County District Court clerk's official page, e-filing payment is processed immediately through a virtual wallet: credit card carries a 4% fee, or a $2 flat fee for e-check. (These apply to attorney e-filers; pro se filers do not use the system.)
This sits on top of the filing fee above, and a percentage surcharge on a few hundred dollars is not small. Whether you have to e-file at all is on the Kansas kit.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| County law library feeThis one is not an extra charge, and we previously showed it as though it were. K.S.A. 20-3129(a) has the clerk tax a library fee of $2.00 to $10.00 in a Chapter 60 case, which is what a divorce is — but subsection (d) says that fee “shall be deducted from the docket fee”. It comes out of the $173, not out of your pocket a second time. Only Sedgwick and Johnson counties may charge an additional library fee that genuinely sits on top, capped at $4.00 by subsection (b), and that is the $2.00 and the $1.50 already counted in the $195.00 above. K.S.A. 20-3129(a), (b), (d) and (f) | $0.00 |
| Service of process, forwarded by the clerk to the sheriffA flat statewide figure, not a county one, and charged for each person to be served. Subsection (b) charges it for unsuccessful attempts as well, though subsections (c) and (d) allow the sheriff only one fee where several papers for the same person, or for different people at the same address, are in hand at once. No fee is charged for process under the Protection from Abuse Act or the Protection from Stalking, Sexual Assault and Human Trafficking Act. K.S.A. 28-110(a), as amended by L. 2025, ch. 22 | $15.00 |
If you cannot afford to file
More people qualify than apply. If this section applies to you it is the most useful thing on this page.
Kansas has a way to file without paying up front
This is a normal court procedure, not a favor you have to plead for.
- What it covers: The docket fee.
- What to ask for: Judicial Council poverty affidavit
- How it works: Poverty affidavit in lieu of the docket fee under K.S.A. 60-2001(b), on a Judicial Council form.
The Judicial Council publishes the poverty affidavit form, and the procedure is in K.S.A. 60-2001(b). Worth knowing that the statute has the court review the petition, so this is a judge’s decision and not a clerk waving it through: subsection (b)(3) lets the court order the fee paid or dismiss without prejudice if it finds the claim of poverty untrue, and service of process does not go out until the review is done.
What we could not find out
Open questions on this page
- We could not re-read the Kansas Judicial Branch’s own ‘District Court Filing Fees’ table on 5 October 2026. kscourts.gov refuses automated requests and returned a block page for every address we tried, including the site root, so the $195.00 total is carried forward from our reading of that table on 23 September 2026 rather than seen again. The statute and Sedgwick County’s own chart both corroborate it.
- The surcharge amount for the 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2030 window is set by Supreme Court order rather than by the statute, and we could not retrieve that order. The statute caps it at $22, and $22 is what Sedgwick County’s chart shows was charged under the previous authority, citing 2017 Supreme Court Order 65.
- On the face of the statutes the previous authority ran out on 30 June 2025 and the renewal does not begin until 1 July 2026. We have not established what was charged in the year between the two, and we are not going to guess at it.
- Johnson County’s $1.50 additional law library fee was not re-verified from a Johnson County source this time; johnsoncountyks.gov was not reachable from the machine that ran the check. Under K.S.A. 20-3129(c) the library trustees in Sedgwick and Johnson may change that fee once a year, with effect from 1 July.
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what Kansas’s own agencies publish, not an omission on our part.
How we know this
Every figure on this page came from a statute, a state court system, or a clerk’s own published fee schedule — never a law firm’s blog, a legal-forms company, or a fee aggregator. For Kansas that means K.S.A. 60-2001, K.S.A. 20-3129 and K.S.A. 28-110 from the Revisor of Statutes, the 2026 amending act read in the enrolled text of House Bill 2393 published by the Legislature, the Sedgwick County docket fee chart, the Douglas County District Court e-filing page and the Judicial Council’s poverty affidavit. We have not linked the enrolled bill itself because every address the Legislature publishes it at carries the session in the path, and we do not cite URLs that are pinned to a session or an effective date. Where a state publishes no date on its fee schedule, we say so rather than implying the number is current. Where nothing is published, we leave it blank.
Court fees change, and they change without announcement. 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 Kansas 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.
Now the part the fees don’t cover
The forms, the deadlines, the residency rule, and what actually happens next.
Or find someone to help
Kansas attorneys, mediators, CDFAs and therapists, credentials checked against the state’s own records. Nobody paid to be there.
The rest of what we have written about Kansas. Every figure is quoted from Kansas’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Common questions about filing costs in Kansas
Short answers to what people ask most about this number. Everything here is drawn from the same sources as the figures above.
How much does it cost to file for divorce in Kansas?
$195 to open the case. What the court actually publishes is $195.00, which includes the $173 docket fee and the Supreme Court’s surcharge. Every figure on this page is traced to Kansas’s own statute or its courts’ published fee schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Is the divorce filing fee the same in every Kansas county?
Almost. Kansas sets the filing fee statewide at $195, but Johnson County adds $1.50 and Sedgwick County adds $2.00.
Is the filing fee the whole cost of a divorce in Kansas?
No, and it is the small number. The filing fee is what it costs to open the case. Serving the papers, any required parenting class, copies and certifications, an attorney if you use one, and the cost of running two households instead of one are all separate — and together they are many times larger. The sections above set out what this figure does and does not buy.
What if I cannot afford the filing fee in Kansas?
There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Kansas requires. You do not have to have decided anything, or have a lawyer, to ask.
How current is this Kansas figure, and where does it come from?
It is quoted from the court’s own published schedule or the statute that sets it, with the date it was last checked shown on the page. Where a figure could not be confirmed from an official source, this site says so rather than estimating — and where a number could only be reached by arithmetic rather than read off a published schedule, it is left out rather than presented as published. That rule is why some rows here say “not published” instead of carrying a tidy figure, and it is the whole basis on which these pages can be reproduced. The full fifty-state comparison is at thecusp.app/divorce-costs/, free to reproduce under the license published there.
Choosing an agent for a divorce sale is a different problem from choosing one for an ordinary sale: who the agent is allowed to talk to, who has to sign, what happens when one of you will not, and the three separate conflicts of interest that come up when one spouse found the agent first. How to choose a real estate agent for a divorce sale sets out what to ask, and how to check a credential yourself — no divorce credential is official with the National Association of Realtors.
The Cusp receives a referral fee from agents it vets and trains to handle divorce clients.