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.
The short version7 points · tap one to jump to it
- Where the money goes
- Does it change by county? — The totals are statewide: $210 for the index number, $125 for the RJI and note of issue together. How that $125 splits between the two is set locally.
- 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 — New York calls it poor person relief. The Plaintiff files an Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed as a Poor Person, and the Unified Court System publishes the procedure.
- 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
- Does it change by county? — The totals are statewide: $210 for the index number, $125 for the RJI and note of issue together. How that $125 splits between the two is set locally.
- 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 — New York calls it poor person relief. The Plaintiff files an Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed as a Poor Person, and the Unified Court System publishes the procedure.
- 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
New York does not publish a single consolidated “divorce filing fee.” The itemization above is taken from County Clerk .gov fee schedules, which list each paper separately. The main nycourts.gov site is behind a Cloudflare bot challenge, but two Unified Court System publications are served from hosts that are not, and both confirm these figures: the New York County Matrimonial Support Office’s e-filing instructions give the index number as “a $210.00 fee,” and the Unified Court System’s Uncontested Joint Divorce Information Booklet (JD-1) gives “an index number costs $210” and “a filing fee of $125 for the Note of Issue and the Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI).” That $125 is the $95.00 and $30.00 below added together, so the top of the range is corroborated by the court system and not only by one clerk. The index-number figure is also cross-checked between two independent county clerks, Dutchess and Monroe, both re-read 30 September 2026.
| 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.” (Monroe County Clerk, read 30 September 2026) | $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?
The totals are the same everywhere in New York — one split is not
The index number is $210 wherever you file: the two independent County Clerk schedules reached agree exactly ($210 in both Dutchess and Monroe), and the Unified Court System’s JD-1 booklet gives the same figure without qualifying it by county. The Note of Issue and the Request for Judicial Intervention come to $125 together statewide — but the split between those two is local, and the court system says so in terms: “Note of Issue and the Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI): $125 total. Depending on the county, the fee may be split differently between the Note of Issue and the RJI.” So the $95.00 and $30.00 itemised above are Dutchess County’s split, not a statewide one; your county may divide the same $125 differently. The Certificate of Dissolution is local too — the JD-1 puts it at “depends on the county, but usually about $0-$5,” and Dutchess prints $5.00. 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 artifact.
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
New York calls it poor person relief, and the court system publishes how to ask
The fee can be waived. The Unified Court System’s own instructions for e-filing an uncontested divorce say that buying the index number “requires payment of a $210.00 fee (the fee may be waived through a poor person’s waiver)” — Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County Matrimonial Support Office, E-Filing of Uncontested Divorce Cases, dated 29 July 2020 (read 30 September 2026).
What you actually file, in the court system’s own words: “If you qualify as indigent, you can apply for a fee waiver for the court fees to start the case, such as the index number… Only ‘Plaintiff’ (Spouse 1) can file a Fee Waiver Application (also called a Poor Person Application) to start the divorce case.” The papers are an Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed as a Poor Person, with proof of income attached — “such as a W-2 or benefit statement” — and a Poor Person Order for the judge to sign. The affidavit is filed at the County Clerk’s Office at the same time as the initiating papers, and the booklet warns: “Do not sign the Application in Support unless you are in front of a notary.” The court then decides, and “may ask for additional proof of income and assets.” Source: Unified Court System, Uncontested Joint Divorce Information Booklet (JD-1), release date 1 February 2020, revised as of 1 October 2021, as published by the Broome County Clerk (read 30 September 2026).
A granted waiver is not just the index number. The JD-1 lists the Note of Issue and Request for Judicial Intervention fees as payable “unless you or your spouse was approved for a fee waiver.” Before you file, do what the booklet itself tells you to do: “check with the County Clerk’s Office or Supreme Court Clerk’s office for further instructions and to see if any additional papers are needed to obtain poor person status.”
Two limits on the above, stated rather than papered over. The income threshold is unconfirmed: neither document publishes a figure or a formula, and both describe the test only as being unable to pay the fees and unable to get a divorce otherwise. We are not going to invent a number for it. And the JD-1 describes New York’s Uncontested Joint Divorce Program specifically, while the e-filing instructions above cover uncontested matrimonial filing generally; both point to the same poor person’s waiver, but the form names we quote come from the joint-divorce packet. The statutory basis is customarily CPLR 1101, which we still could not read from any reachable New York government server.
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 schedule-wide effective date is printed on either county clerk fee schedule reached, so we give none and have not inferred one from the page. The Dutchess schedule does carry per-line effective dates for unrelated items — a lis pendens index-number fee effective 9/1/2010, a residential deed notification effective 3/11/20 — so the absence of one on the divorce lines is the schedule’s omission, not ours. Re-read 30 September 2026: index number $210.00, RJI $95.00, note of issue $30.00, certificate of dissolution $5.00, all unchanged.
- Resolved 30 September 2026: the name of the initiating paper. The Unified Court System’s e-filing instructions name it — “a Summons with Notice or a Summons and Verified Complaint must be e-filed and served upon the defendant” — and the JD-1 booklet refers to filing the “Summons with Notice and Combined Notice of Appearance” at the County Clerk’s Office.
- Resolved 30 September 2026: fee waiver / poor person relief. Two Unified Court System publications, reachable away from the blocked nycourts.gov host, set out the mechanism, the forms and the coverage, and the section above now quotes them. The threshold is still open: neither document publishes an income figure or a formula, so we do not state one.
- 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: nothing we have read distinguishes them. The JD-1 booklet covers the with-children and no-children packets alike and gives one set of figures, and the e-filing instructions give the same $210 for the with-children and without-children uncontested packets. That is an absence of any different figure, not a published statement that they are equal, so it stays on this list.
- Reachable after all, and used above:
iappscontent.courts.state.ny.usserves Unified Court System PDFs without the Cloudflare challenge that blocksiapps.courts.state.ny.usandwww.nycourts.gov. The two nycourts.gov form URLs the JD-1 points to for the affidavit and the order are still blocked, which is why those forms are named here but not linked. - 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.
The rest of what we have written about New York. Every figure is quoted from New York’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.
Common questions about filing costs in New York
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 New York?
$210 to open the case. What the court actually publishes is $210.00 (index number only) – $335.00 (index number + RJI + note of issue). Every figure on this page is traced to New York’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 New York county?
Yes. New York sets the filing fee statewide, so the figure is the same whichever county you file in. It is $210.
Is the filing fee the whole cost of a divorce in New York?
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 New York?
Yes. New York calls it poor person relief, and the section above quotes the Unified Court System’s own instructions. The Plaintiff files an Affidavit in Support of Application to Proceed as a Poor Person, with proof of income attached, together with a Poor Person Order for the judge to sign, at the County Clerk’s Office at the same time as the initiating papers. A granted waiver covers the $125 Note of Issue and RJI fees as well as the $210 index number. You do not have to have decided anything, or have a lawyer, to ask.
How current is this New York 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.