What a New York 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 stateNew York
It costs $210.00 to file for divorce in New York. 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. The index number is the number people quote, but it is not the price of a New York divorce. On the Dutchess County Clerk’s schedule the index number is $210.00, and then the Request for Judicial Intervention adds $95.00 when a judge is first asked to act and the Note of Issue adds $30.00 to reach the trial calendar – $335.00 in clerk fees before service, the certificate of dissolution ($5.00), or anything else.
Where the money goes
New York does not publish a single consolidated “divorce filing fee.” The itemisation above is taken from County Clerk .gov fee schedules, which list each paper separately. Because the New York State Unified Court System’s own site (nycourts.gov) is behind a Cloudflare bot challenge, the itemisation could not be cross-checked against an OCA publication; it was instead cross-checked between two independent county clerks (Dutchess and Monroe) for the index-number figure.
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Index Number (purchased from the County Clerk to commence the action)Independently corroborated by the Monroe County Clerk: “The index application must be completed and filed at the Monroe County Clerk’s Office. The fee per number is $210” and “A $210 check payable to the County Clerk for assigning an index number, starts a civil action proceeding.” (https://www.monroecounty.gov/clerk-court) | $210.00 |
| Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI)Paid when the case is first put before a judge. This is why a New York divorce costs more than the index number alone. | $95.00 |
| Note of IssuePaid to place the case on the trial calendar. | $30.00 |
| Certificate of Dissolution of MarriageListed separately on the County Clerk fee schedule. A “Separation Agreement” filing is also $5.00. | $5.00 |
Does it change by county?
No — the fee is the same everywhere in New York
The index number, RJI and note of issue fees are statewide statutory fees collected by County Clerks, not county-set. The two independent County Clerk schedules reached agree exactly on the index-number fee ($210 in both Dutchess and Monroe), which is consistent with a statewide fee rather than a local one. Note that the same schedules show genuinely different amounts for other case types – e.g. Dutchess charges an extra $190 index-number fee in a mortgage foreclosure – so the uniformity of the divorce figure is meaningful, not an artefact.
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.
Nothing extra to e-file
We looked for a portal fee and a card surcharge in New York and found neither published. That is not the same as a guarantee — clerks can charge for things they do not put on a web page — but there is no extra charge we can point you at. Whether you have to e-file at all is on the New York kit.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Service of process by sheriff/constable, per respondentCOULD NOT BE CONFIRMED. New York sheriffs’ civil-process fees are set county by county and none was located on a reachable .gov fee schedule; the Dutchess and Monroe County Clerk schedules cover clerk filings only, not sheriff service. | not published |
| Parenting/parent-education class, if requiredCOULD NOT BE CONFIRMED, including whether it is MANDATORY with minor children. The New York court system’s self-help materials (nycourts.gov/courthelp) are the authoritative source for this and are behind a Cloudflare bot challenge; no substitute official source was found. | not published |
| Court-ordered mediationCOULD NOT BE CONFIRMED. New York’s Community Dispute Resolution Centers Program is administered by the Unified Court System, whose site is blocked. | not published |
| E-filing or credit-card surchargeCOULD NOT BE CONFIRMED. NYSCEF (iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef) is behind the same Cloudflare bot challenge. Neither county clerk fee schedule reached lists an e-filing or card surcharge. | not published |
If you cannot afford to file
We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in New York
Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find New York’s procedure published on an official source, so we are not going to describe one. Ask the clerk directly: “What do I file to ask the court to waive the filing fee?” They are required to tell you.
What we could not find out
Open questions on this page
- The statutory authority for every New York figure is unverified. http://www.nysenate.gov (the Senate’s official statute text) and public.leginfo.state.ny.us (the NYS Legislative Retrieval System) were both unreachable, so CPLR 8018 and CPLR 8020 are named only as the customary cites and are expressly not asserted as verified.
- No effective date is printed on either county clerk fee schedule reached, so effective_date is null rather than inferred from the page.
- The exact name of the initiating paper could not be confirmed from an official source.
- Fee waiver / poor person relief: mechanism, threshold, form and coverage all unverified – every official New York source for this is on nycourts.gov.
- Sheriff service fees, parenting-class requirement and cost, mediation cost, and e-filing surcharges: all unverified for the same reason.
- Whether the fee differs with minor children could not be confirmed.
- Sources we could not read: https://www.nycourts.gov/ (and http://www.courts.state.ny.us, ww2.nycourts.gov, iapps.courts.state.ny.us) – returns HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare “Just a moment…” managed JavaScript challenge. Not bypassed, as instructed. This b; https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/CVP/8018 and /8020 – HTTP 403, same Cloudflare managed challenge. Not bypassed.; https://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/ (NYS Legislative Retrieval System) – connection reset by peer on every request.; https://legislation.nysenate.gov/api/3/laws/CVP/8018 – HTTP 401, requires an API key.; https://ulstercountyny.gov/county-clerk and https://www.tompkinscountyny.gov/countyclerk – HTTP 403.
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what New York’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 New York 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
New York attorneys, mediators, CDFAs and therapists, credentials checked against the state’s own records. Nobody paid to be there.