What a Minnesota 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 stateMinnesota
It costs $390.00 plus your county’s law library fee to file for divorce in Minnesota — $402.00 in Hennepin, $405.00 in Ramsey, Dakota and St. Louis, and a figure nobody has published in one place for the other 83 counties. The statute says $340; nobody pays $340. And each spouse who files a paper pays it, not only the one who starts the case. 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. Minnesota charges the dissolution fee TWICE. Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1) requires the petitioner to pay $340 when the first paper is filed, and then says in the very next sentence that ‘The defendant or other adverse or intervening party … shall pay, when the first paper is filed for that party in said action, a fee of $310, except in marriage dissolution actions the fee is $340.’ So a responding spouse who files any answer or appearance owes their own $340 — and it is worse than that, because § 518.005, subd. 6 charges its $50 on “the first paper filed for a party”, and the county law library fee is collected from “each defendant, respondent, intervenor or other party who appears” under § 134A.09, subd. 1(b) and § 134A.10, subd. 1(b). A responding spouse in Hennepin who files anything therefore faces the same $402.00 the petitioner paid, not $340. Also, $30 of each $340 is statutorily diverted to the Minnesota Family Resiliency Partnership rather than to the courts (subd. 1(a)).
The short version7 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes — Minnesota does NOT publish a component breakdown of the dissolution filing fee.
- Does it change by county? — The $390 is the same statewide, but each county adds its own law library fee: $402 in Hennepin, $405 in Ramsey.
- 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 — Minnesota does NOT publish a component breakdown of the dissolution filing fee.
- Does it change by county? — The $390 is the same statewide, but each county adds its own law library fee: $402 in Hennepin, $405 in Ramsey.
- 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
Minnesota does not break this down
Minnesota does NOT publish a component breakdown of the dissolution filing fee. Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2(1) sets one flat figure: ‘a fee of $310, except in marriage dissolution actions the fee is $340.’ The only itemization the statute gives is a distribution instruction, not a separate charge: under subd. 1(a), ‘$30 of each fee collected in a dissolution action under subdivision 2, clause (1), must be deposited … in the special revenue fund and is appropriated to the commissioner of employment and economic development for the Minnesota Family Resiliency Partnership under section 116L.96.’ That $30 is carved out of the $340, not added to it. No fabricated breakdown is given here.
Does it change by county?
The base is the same everywhere; the law library fee is not
The $340 is fixed statewide by Minn. Stat. § 357.021, subd. 2, which applies to ‘said court’ – the district court – with no county-by-county authority to vary it, and the $50 under § 518.005, subd. 6 is statewide too, for $390.00. Minnesota has a single unified District Court across all 87 counties and 10 judicial districts, so the $390.00 does not move.
What changes by county is the law library fee collected at filing, and Minnesota does not publish it in one place. Section 134A.09, subd. 3 gives the amount in Hennepin and Ramsey to the law library board of trustees with the county commissioners’ approval; § 134A.10, subd. 4 does the same in the other 85 counties, adds that the fee “shall be set on July 1 each year and remain in effect until changed”, and requires in both sections that “all law library fees shall be published in the State Register.” It is a cost in the action and taxable as such (§ 134A.12), and it is not charged in actions brought by the state, the county or a municipality, or in garnishment (§ 134A.11).
The four county figures we can stand behind: Hennepin $402.00, Ramsey $405.00, Dakota $405.00 and St. Louis $405.00 — St. Louis because the county’s own 2026 Fee Schedule prints a Law Library line of $15.00 for civil matters, which added to $390.00 is $405.00. We have not read the other 83. We are not going to tell you the range runs from $402 to $405 on the strength of four counties out of 87; what we can tell you is that $390.00 is the floor under all of them and that no county we have found sets the library fee at nothing.
What else varies locally: (a) sheriff’s service fees, which § 357.09, subd. 8 hands to the county board — “The county board shall set the sheriff’s fees with the advice and consultation of the sheriff” — rather than setting them by statute; and (b) parent education program fees, which § 518.157, subd. 6 leaves to program providers on a sliding scale, with each judicial district implementing its own program under subd. 1(a).
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.
E-filing is not free, and paper is the way to avoid it
This section used to say there was no extra charge we could point you at. That was wrong, and our own Minnesota kit already said so. The Judiciary’s own Odyssey File & Serve FAQ (ODY-FS-600-3051) prints a transaction table — $5.00 e-file only, $8.00 e-filing with service, $3.00 service only — and says separately that “a convenience fee is assessed to cover the credit card processing fees and may vary by court”, without ever quantifying it. The good news for a self-filer: under Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(b)(5)(i) a self-represented litigant “may elect” to e-file but “is not required to do so”, so filing over the counter avoids all of it. The catch runs the other way for anyone with a lawyer: Rule 14.01(b)(3) lets a Select User be excused from mandatory e-filing for good cause, and then “court personnel shall scan all documents filed conventionally into the court’s computer system and charge the filing party a $25 scanning fee for each 50 pages, or part thereof, of the filing.”
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Service of process by sheriff, per respondentMinnesota does NOT set a statewide dollar amount. § 357.09, subd. 1 lists ‘serving a summons, warrant, writ, subpoena, or any process issued by a court of record, for each defendant served and mileage’ as a chargeable activity, but the amounts are ‘Fees set under subdivision 8’ – i.e. set locally, not in statute. There is no verified statewide figure. Mileage is computed from the place where court is usually held (subd. 2). Minn. Stat. § 357.09, subd. 1(1) and subd. 8 | not published |
| Parenting/parent-education class, if requiredMANDATORY, but the trigger is disagreement, not merely the existence of minor children: ‘In a proceeding under this chapter where the parties have not agreed to custody or a parenting time schedule, the court SHALL order the parents of a minor child to attend or take online a minimum of eight hours in an orientation and education program.’ Where the parties HAVE agreed, subd. 3(b) makes it discretionary (‘may order’). Participation must normally begin before the initial case management conference and within 30 days of first filing (subd. 3(d)). A fee is charged – ‘each person who attends a parent education program shall pay a fee to defray the cost of the program’ – but NO dollar amount is published in statute; ‘Program providers shall implement a sliding fee scale.’ Anyone who qualifies for a filing-fee waiver under § 563.01 is exempt from the parent education fee. Minn. Stat. § 518.157, subd. 3(a) and subd. 6 | not published |
| Court-ordered mediationThe statute requires the court to notify parties of ‘their option to resolve disagreements, including the development of a parenting plan, through the use of private mediation.’ No statewide mediation fee is set by statute, and Rule 114 of the General Rules of Practice, which governs court-annexed ADR, sets no rate for a party-selected neutral. No figure is given. Minn. Stat. § 518.157, subd. 3(f) | not published |
| E-filing transaction fee, per envelopeMinn. Stat. § 357.021 contains no e-filing or card surcharge; the charge sits with the e-filing system instead. The Judicial Branch’s own Odyssey File & Serve FAQ, document ODY-FS-600-3051, prints “EFO (e-file only) $5.00 / EFS (e-filing with service) $8.00 / SO (service only) $3.00”. Read with care: the cover of that document is revision v.14, March 2020, but the page carrying the fee table is still stamped “March 2013 ODY-FS-600-3051v.13”, so we quote it as what the Judiciary publishes and not as a figure we can date to this year. Hennepin County’s own fee page, effective 1 July 2025, put it at “a $5.00 processing fee” when it was read on 2 October 2026. A self-represented litigant is not required to e-file at all (Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(b)(5)(i)). Minnesota Judicial Branch, Odyssey File & Serve FAQ (ODY-FS-600-3051), hosted by the Designated Provider under Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(a)(4) | $5.00–$8.00 |
| Credit-card convenience feeIt exists and no amount is published anywhere we can read. The same FAQ says only that “a convenience fee is assessed to cover the credit card processing fees and may vary by court”, and that Minnesota accepts MasterCard, Visa and Discover. Minn. Stat. § 16A.626, which lets a state agency add a convenience fee to a card payment, reaches only “the executive branch of state government”, so it is not the authority for a court charge and cannot be used to put a number on this. Minn. Stat. § 16A.626 (read, and not applicable to the judiciary) | exists, not quantified |
| Scanning fee for paper filed by a party who must e-fileAttorneys, government agencies and guardians ad litem (“Select Users”) must e-file statewide. One who is excused for good cause pays to have the paper scanned: “court personnel shall scan all documents filed conventionally into the court’s computer system and charge the filing party a $25 scanning fee for each 50 pages, or part thereof, of the filing.” This does not reach a self-represented filer, who may use paper as of right. Minn. Gen. R. Prac. 14.01(b)(3) | $25.00 / 50pp |
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.
Minnesota 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: Persons PRESUMED to qualify under § 563.01, subd. 3(b): a person receiving public assistance described in § 550.37, subd. 14; a person represented by an attorney through a civil legal services program or volunteer attorney program based on indigency; or a person ‘who has an annual income not greater than 125 percent of the poverty line established under United States Code, title 42, section 9902(2).’ Partial relief also exists: under subd. 3(c), if the party does not meet the criteria but still cannot pay in full, ‘the court may order payment of a fee of $75 or partial payment of the fees, costs, and security for costs.’
- What it covers: Filing fees, costs, and security for costs. Under subd. 4, ‘the court administrator and the sheriff of any Minnesota county shall perform their duties without charge’ – so sheriff service of process is covered – and the court ‘shall direct payment of the reasonable expense of service of process … if served by a private process server, if the sheriff is unavailable, or by publication.’ Subd. 5 covers reasonable witness/subpoena expenses. Separately, Minn. Stat. § 518.157, subd. 6 exempts a § 563.01-qualifying party from the parent education program fee.
- How it works: Court fee waiver (‘in forma pauperis’). Under Minn. Stat. § 563.01, subd. 3(a), a court ‘may authorize the commencement or defense of any civil action … without payment of fees, costs, and security for costs by a natural person who makes affidavit stating (1) the nature of the action, defense or appeal, (2) a belief that affiant is entitled to redress, and (3) that affiant is financially unable to pay the fees, costs and security for costs.’ The court must grant it if the affidavit is substantially in the statutory form and is not untrue.
What we could not find out
Open questions on this page
- No effective date could be confirmed for the fee itself. The Revisor’s recent-history list for § 357.021 ends ‘2025 Subd. 2 Amended 2025 c 35 art 1 s 20’ and § 518.005’s ends ‘2024 c 80 art 8 s 68’, but neither section prints an effective date for its current text and we will not infer one from a session-law citation.
- 83 of Minnesota’s 87 county law library fees are unread. The statute says where they are published — §§ 134A.09, subd. 3 and 134A.10, subd. 4 both require that ‘all law library fees shall be published in the State Register’ — but the Revisor’s State Register archive is only indexed for older volumes (a control search of volumes 50–51 for a common word returns nothing), and the current issues are PDFs on a separate state site. Someone willing to read a year of State Register issues, or to ring 83 court administrators, can close this.
- Hennepin’s $402.00, Ramsey’s $405.00 and Dakota’s $405.00 were read from the Judicial Branch’s own county fee pages on 2 October 2026 and could not be re-read today. They are corroborated in shape, not in amount, by St. Louis County’s own 2026 fee schedule, which prints a $15.00 civil law library fee and so also comes to $405.00.
- The parent education program fee amount is genuinely unpublished — § 518.157, subd. 6 mandates a sliding fee scale set by providers, so there is no figure to report. A party who qualifies for a fee waiver under § 563.01 is exempt from it.
- Sheriff service-of-process fees are set by each county board under § 357.09, subd. 8, not by statute, and no county sheriff schedule was verified. Mileage is computed from the place where court is usually held (subd. 2).
- The credit-card convenience fee is published as existing and nowhere quantified. The name and number of Minnesota’s fee-waiver form could not be confirmed either, because both live on mncourts.gov.
- Why mncourts.gov is missing from the sources above, precisely. Every path on that host — the home page, /robots.txt, a deliberately nonsensical path, and the fee pages themselves — returns HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare ‘Just a moment…’ interstitial. We tried it with a plain client, with a desktop browser user-agent and with no user-agent, and then with a real headless Chromium, which is normally enough to clear that screen; the browser could not clear it either, because this machine’s network cannot reach the Cloudflare host that serves the challenge itself. So this is not a path problem and not a user-agent filter: the host is simply closed to us. For whoever tries next: the live addresses are now lowercase and the fee lookup takes a county, in the form /help-topics/court-fees/district-court-fees?c=hennepin — the /Help-Topics/Court-Fees.aspx form this page used to cite has been retired.
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what Minnesota’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 — and where we quote a document whose own pages carry two different revision stamps, as Minnesota’s e-filing FAQ does, we print both rather than picking the flattering one. 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 Minnesota 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
Minnesota 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 Minnesota. Every figure is quoted from Minnesota’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Common questions about filing costs in Minnesota
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 Minnesota?
$390 plus your county’s law library fee to open the case. The $390.00 is two statutes stacked — $340.00 under § 357.021, subd. 2(1) and $50.00 under § 518.005, subd. 6 — and it is the same in all 87 counties. The county law library fee on top is set locally: $402.00 in Hennepin and $405.00 in Ramsey, Dakota and St. Louis. Those are four counties out of 87, and this page says so rather than calling them the range.
Is the divorce filing fee the same in every Minnesota county?
The statutory part is. Minnesota sets $390 statewide, and then each county’s law library board sets a fee that is collected at filing on top of it — from the responding spouse as well as the petitioner. Hennepin comes to $402; Ramsey, Dakota and St. Louis to $405. The other 83 counties publish theirs in the State Register rather than in any one list, and we have not read them, so treat $390 as the floor and ask your own court administrator for the rest.
Is the filing fee the whole cost of a divorce in Minnesota?
No, and it is the small number. The filing fee is what it costs to open the case. Serving the papers, the parent education program Minnesota orders when you have a minor child and have not agreed on custody or parenting time, 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 Minnesota?
There is a process for asking the court to waive or defer it, and this page sets out what Minnesota requires. You do not have to have decided anything, or have a lawyer, to ask.
How current is this Minnesota 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.