What a Massachusetts 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 stateMassachusetts
It costs $215.00 to file a joint petition for divorce in Massachusetts and $220.00 to file a divorce complaint — the complaint adds the $5.00 charge for the summons the court issues against the other spouse. Below is where that money goes, what it does not cover, and what to do if you do not have it.
Worth knowing before you file. Massachusetts law is unusually explicit that the indigency waiver reaches past the filing fee: M.G.L. c. 261 § 27A defines the waivable ‘normal fees and costs’ to include the c. 262 § 4C surcharge, service of process AND publication of a citation, subpoena and witness fees, and jury trial fees – and under § 27C(2) a facially valid affidavit must be granted by the clerk ‘forthwith without hearing’, so an eligible filer does not have to wait for a judge or appear in court to get the $215 or $220 waived.
The short version7 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes — $200 + $15 = $215 for a 1A joint petition; a 1B or fault complaint adds a $5.00 summons charge, so $220.
- Does it change by county? — The fee is set by statewide statute, M.G.L. c. 262 § 40, which fixes 'the fees of the registers of the probate and family court' for the whole Commonwealth, and the § 4C surcharge applies 'in any court of the commonwealth'.
- 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 7
Where the money goes
The short version7 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes — $200 + $15 = $215 for a 1A joint petition; a 1B or fault complaint adds a $5.00 summons charge, so $220.
- Does it change by county? — The fee is set by statewide statute, M.G.L. c. 262 § 40, which fixes 'the fees of the registers of the probate and family court' for the whole Commonwealth, and the § 4C surcharge applies 'in any court of the commonwealth'.
- 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 7
All three components are now confirmed. The $200 entry fee and the $15 surcharge are quoted from the statute. The third, the $5.00 summons charge, is set not by statute but by the Trial Court’s uniform schedule of fees under M.G.L. c. 262 § 4B — and it is published, in three places: the Uniform Schedule of Fees itself, the overview to the Probate and Family Court filing-fee list, and the Trial Court’s step-by-step pages for a 1B and a fault divorce, each of which prints “Divorce summons charge $5” as its own line. It applies to a complaint, not to a 1A joint petition, where there is nobody to summons.
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Entry fee, complaint for divorceStatute: ‘for the filing of a complaint for affirmation of marriage, annulment, divorce, $200’. Section 40 is headed ‘Registers of probate and family court; enumeration of fees’. M.G.L. c. 262 § 40 | $200.00 |
| Statutory surcharge on filing feesStatute: ‘Any party entering a complaint, petition or other civil action in any court of the commonwealth, except small claims cases, in which an initial filing fee is payable, and to which a separate docket number is assigned shall pay to the clerk of said court a surcharge of $15 in addition to the fee otherwise required by this chapter.’ Credited to the General Fund. M.G.L. c. 262 § 4C | $15.00 |
| Summons feeCharged on a complaint, not on a 1A joint petition. Section 4B sets no amount itself – it delegates to ‘a uniform schedule of fees’ established by the court administrator of the trial court subject to the approval of the Supreme Judicial Court. That schedule prices ‘a blank summons, other than any summons in a small claims action or incident to a petition for victim compensation, or blank writ’ at $5.00, and the Probate and Family Court’s fee list says in its own overview: ‘Each citation is an additional $15 and each summons is an additional $5.’ Section 40 separately sets $5 for a CONTEMPT summons; that is a different instrument and is not the authority for this row. M.G.L. c. 262 § 4B · Uniform Schedule of Fees · Probate and Family Court filing fees | $5.00 |
Does it change by county?
No — the fee is the same everywhere in Massachusetts
The fee is set by statewide statute, M.G.L. c. 262 § 40, which fixes ‘the fees of the registers of the probate and family court’ for the whole Commonwealth, and the § 4C surcharge applies ‘in any court of the commonwealth’. The Probate and Family Court is a single statewide department of the Trial Court with divisions by county, not separately fee-setting courts, and M.G.L. c. 262 § 4B requires a UNIFORM schedule of fees approved by the Supreme Judicial Court. No county surcharge is authorized in the statute, and we have now cross-checked the statute against the court’s own list: the Probate and Family Court filing fees page is a single statewide schedule covering all 14 divisions, printing “Divorce, Complaint” at $200 with a $15 surcharge and no division-by-division variation.
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
- Portal fee
- $22.00 one-time eFile submission fee on case initiation, payable to Tyler Technologies
- If you pay by card
- 2.89% of the fees total for credit card; $0.25 additional for eCheck
- If your filing fee is waived
- Not charged — the one-time fee applies “unless the initial filing fee has been waived”
Both figures are the Trial Court’s own: Learn about eFiling in the Trial Court. This sits on top of the filing fee above, and a percentage surcharge on a few hundred dollars is not small. E-filing a Massachusetts divorce is optional for everyone, self-represented filers included, so paper remains the cheaper route. Whether you have to e-file at all is on the Massachusetts kit.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Service of process by sheriff or constable, per respondent (1B only)Set by statute, not by the county. M.G.L. c. 262 § 8(a)(2) prices this instrument by name: ‘for service of an original summons and complaint for divorce or for any other service required to be served in hand, $30 for each defendant upon whom service is made.’ Section 8(a)(3) adds $5 for attesting each copy, and § 8(a)(19) adds travel at 32 cents a mile each way, tapering above 20 and above 50 miles. The same section governs constables as well as sheriffs and deputy sheriffs. What a county office quotes you is those items added up: Norfolk County, the one office we found publishing a figure, says the fee for both constables and deputy sheriffs ‘are set by statute and vary from case to case’, will ‘not exceed $65.00’ for the vast majority of services, and prints $65.00 for in-state court-issued documents and $36.00 for each additional defendant at the same address. M.G.L. c. 261 § 27A makes service of process one of the ‘normal fees and costs’ an indigency affidavit waives. M.G.L. c. 262 § 8 · Norfolk County Sheriff, Civil Process FAQ | $35.00 + travelstatutory minimum; Norfolk publishes $65.00 |
| Co-parenting education course, per parentRequired, priced, and waivable — and the exemption matters. Probate and Family Court Standing Order 3-23, issued 22 January 2024 and effective 12 February 2024, orders all parents to attend the court-approved ‘Two Families Now’ course in four listed case types involving custody or parenting time of minor children, the first of which is ‘Complaint for Divorce (except for complaints filed pursuant to G. L. c. 208, § 1A)’. So a 1A joint petition with children is outside the requirement; a 1B or fault complaint with children is inside it. ‘The cost to attend “Two Families Now” is $49.00 per parent’ — each parent pays their own, to the provider, at registration. A parent who cannot afford it files the Affidavit of Indigency and Request for Waiver under G. L. c. 261 § 27B and uploads the approved waiver when registering. Attendance itself can be waived on a Motion to Waive Attendance (CJD 444), and the order lists the grounds, including a filed written agreement on custody and parenting time. Probate and Family Court Standing Order 3-23 | $49.00 |
| Court-connected mediation and dispute interventionMassachusetts publishes no single rate, and that is by design rather than by omission — but it publishes the rules the rate must obey, and two things that are free. Uniform Rule 7(e) under S.J.C. Rule 1:18 provides: ‘Programs may charge fees for service. Parties shall not be charged a fee for attendance at a mandatory screening session or an early intervention event, or for dispute resolution services provided by court employees. Fees charged by a provider of court-connected dispute resolution services shall be approved by the Chief Justice of the applicable court department. The fee schedule shall provide for fee waived or reduced fee services to be made available to indigent and low income litigants.’ The Probate and Family Court’s own ADR page confirms that some approved programs charge nothing, and that its on-site ‘dispute intervention’ — probation officers acting as neutrals in each of the 14 divisions, which a judge may require you to attend — carries no fee. A private mediator you choose yourselves is a different thing and sets its own price. Uniform Dispute Resolution Rule 7(e) · Probate and Family Court approved ADR programs | $0.00 for screening and court-run dispute intervention |
| E-filing fee and card surcharge, if you e-filePublished, and optional. ‘The first time you submit documents through efileMA to initiate a case with the Court, there is a $22.00 fee payable to Tyler Technologies’, charged only once the court accepts the filing. ‘If you use an eCheck (ACH) Payment Account to pay for your eFile submission, there is an additional processing fee of $0.25 for the eFile submission. If you use a credit card Payment Account, the processing fee is 2.89% of the fees total (total fees = court fee + fee to Tyler Technologies).’ The Supreme Judicial Court’s announcement of the $22 figure records that it ‘is paid by a plaintiff, appellant, or petitioner when a case is begun by e-filing, unless the initial filing fee has been waived.’ E-filing is not mandatory in the Probate and Family Court, so a filer paying at the counter pays none of this. Learn about eFiling in the Trial Court | $22.00 + 2.89% |
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.
Massachusetts has a way to file without paying up front
This is a normal court procedure, not a favor you have to plead for.
- Who qualifies: ‘Indigent’ is defined in M.G.L. c. 261 § 27A as (a) a person receiving public assistance under AFDC, the program of emergency aid for elderly and disabled residents, veterans’ benefits programs, SSI (Title XVI) or Medicaid; or (b) a person whose income after taxes is 125 per cent or less of the current poverty threshold; or (c) a person unable to pay the fees and costs without depriving themselves or their dependents of the necessities of life.
- What it covers: ‘Normal fees and costs’ as defined in M.G.L. c. 261 § 27A, which expressly includes ‘in all civil cases, filing or entry fees, including the surcharges required by section four C of chapter two hundred and sixty-two; fees and related costs for service of process, including publications of a citation when publication is ordered; fees and costs for the issuance or service of a subpoena and witness fees for trial or deposition; jury trial fees; removal fees; costs assessed in a bill of costs’ and ‘in the probate and family court department, fees for an amendment of record.’
- What to ask for: the form titled Affidavit of Indigency and Request for Waiver, Substitution or State Payment of Fees & Costs, prescribed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court under M.G.L. c. 261 § 27B. If you qualify under category (C) — unable to pay without going without the necessities of life — you must also file the Supplement to the Affidavit of Indigency. Both, with instructions, are on the Trial Court’s court forms for indigency page, which also offers an Affidavit of Indigency Guide & File program that fills the form in from plain-language questions; the Registry of Probate in every division keeps paper copies.
- How it works: Affidavit of indigency filed with the complaint. Under M.G.L. c. 261 § 27C(1), if the affidavit is filed with the initiating paper ‘the clerk shall receive the complaint or other paper for filing and proceed as if all regular filing fees had been paid’, conditionally. Under § 27C(2), if the affidavit is regular and complete on its face and shows indigency, ‘the clerk shall grant such request forthwith without hearing and without the necessity of appearance of any party or counsel.’ If denied, the fees must be paid within five days. Under § 27C(4), on a finding of indigency the court ‘shall not deny any request with respect to normal fees and costs.’
What we could not find out
Open questions on this page
- What any individual sheriff’s or constable’s office actually bills for serving a divorce complaint. The statute sets $30 in hand, $5 per attested copy and 32 cents a mile; one office of fourteen, Norfolk County, publishes the figure it adds those up to. The other thirteen publish nothing a reader like ours can retrieve, and settling it would take thirteen phone calls, not another fetch.
- Whether any Probate and Family Court division’s Registry charges for photocopies of the forms, and at what rate. The Uniform Schedule of Fees prices an attested copy at $2.50 a page and an unattested one at 5 cents, but what a counter charges a self-filer for a blank packet is not published.
- What any particular approved mediation program charges. Rule 7(e) requires each schedule to be approved by the department’s Chief Justice and to carry a reduced or waived rate for indigent and low-income litigants, but the approved schedules themselves are not published centrally.
- Whether the 2.89% card surcharge is itself waived along with the $22 fee for an indigent e-filer. The Judiciary says the $22 is not charged where the filing fee has been waived and is silent on the card charge, which would in that case be a percentage of nothing.
- The 1A route’s publication cost, if the court ever orders a citation published. The Uniform Schedule prices the order of notice or citation at $15.00, but the newspaper’s own charge is set by the newspaper.
- Nothing on this page now rests on a source we could not reach. The mass.gov host serves this runner normally; it answers some browser user-agent strings with HTTP 403 and others with the page, and two fee URLs this page had previously tried are genuine 404s rather than blocks. The live addresses are /info-details/probate-and-family-court-filing-fees and /info-details/uniform-schedule-of-fees. We make no claim about what the host did on any earlier date.
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what Massachusetts’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. 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 Massachusetts 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
Massachusetts 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 Massachusetts. Every figure is quoted from Massachusetts’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Common questions about filing costs in Massachusetts
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 Massachusetts?
$215 for a 1A joint petition and $220 for a 1B or fault complaint. The court publishes the three lines separately: a $200 filing fee, a $15 surcharge, and a $5 summons charge that only a complaint incurs. Every figure on this page is traced to Massachusetts’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 Massachusetts county?
Yes. Massachusetts sets the filing fee statewide, so the figure is the same whichever of the 14 divisions you file in. It is $215 for a joint petition and $220 for a complaint.
Is the filing fee the whole cost of a divorce in Massachusetts?
No, and it is the small number. The filing fee is what it costs to open the case. In Massachusetts the named extras are a sheriff or constable to serve a 1B complaint (the statute sets $30 in hand plus $5 a copy plus mileage; one county publishes $65), the $49-per-parent “Two Families Now” course if you file a complaint with minor children, $22 plus 2.89% if you choose to e-file, and $20 for the Certificate of Divorce Absolute at the end. An attorney, if you use one, and the cost of running two households instead of one dwarf all of it. The sections above set out what this figure does and does not buy.
What if I cannot afford the filing fee in Massachusetts?
There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Massachusetts requires. You do not have to have decided anything, or have a lawyer, to ask.
How current is this Massachusetts 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.