What a South Dakota 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 stateSouth Dakota
It costs $97.00 to file for divorce in South Dakota. 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. South Dakota’s fee waiver is unusually generous in scope — form UJS-022 covers not just the filing fee but the sheriff’s service-of-process fee as well, which North Dakota’s waiver explicitly refuses to cover. The sharper trap is timing: with minor children, both parties must finish a court-approved parenting course within sixty days of service, and a final decree cannot be entered until they do (UJS-364), yet the courts publish no price for that course anywhere — it is the one mandatory divorce cost in South Dakota with no official figure attached.
Where the money goes
South Dakota is the one state of these three that does publish a real component breakdown: the Schedule of Court Costs itemizes divorce as $50.00 + $40.00 automation + $7.00 law library = $97.00 total. The $97 total is independently corroborated on the UJS divorce checklists, which state ‘$97 filing fee’.
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Divorce filing feeBase fee line item. SD UJS Schedule of Court Costs, civil filings table | $50.00 |
| Automation surchargeNot charged on a child support modification filing, which is $50 flat with no surcharges. SD UJS Schedule of Court Costs, civil filings table | $40.00 |
| Law library fee SD UJS Schedule of Court Costs, civil filings table | $7.00 |
Does it change by county?
No — the fee is the same everywhere in South Dakota
South Dakota’s Unified Judicial System publishes one statewide Schedule of Court Costs binding in all seven judicial circuits; the $97 divorce total appears as a single statewide figure with no county-level add-on line. Sheriff service fees are collected at county level and may well differ by county, but no county schedule was reachable, so I cannot assert or quantify variation there.
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
- 3.5% processing fee on card transactions, per the UJS File & Serve FAQ. The system also accepts debit cards, drawdown accounts, and eChecks.
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 South Dakota kit.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Fee at entry of the decree / final judgmentWe went looking for a separate fee charged when the decree is entered in South Dakota, and found none. The Schedule of Court Costs contains no decree-entry or judgment-entry line item, and neither the with-children checklist (UJS-307B) nor the without-children checklist (UJS-307A) mentions any fee due at finalization. The entire $97 is due at filing. I am reporting this as unconfirmed-absent rather than asserting none exists, since we could not read SDCL 16-2-29.2. | not published |
| Answer or responsive pleading (paid by the responding spouse)Notably cheaper than North Dakota’s $100 answer fee. SD UJS Schedule of Court Costs, civil filings table | $25.00 |
| Mandatory parent education classMANDATORY where minor children are involved. UJS-364 (Rev. 06/2026): ‘In order for a final decree or order to be entered in a case involving child custody or parenting time a parenting course is required to be completed by both parties within sixty days.’ The checklist adds that parties must complete a court-approved parenting course ‘within sixty days of being served with the Summons and Complaint.’ NO FEE IS PUBLISHED anywhere on the UJS materials — courses are run by approved outside providers, so the cost is not a court fee and no amount is stated. Cited on UJS-364 only as ‘South Dakota law’; the specific SDCL section is not printed on the form | not published |
| Sheriff service of process, per respondentA ‘Service Fee’ exists and is expressly one of the items the UJS-022 waiver can excuse, so South Dakota clearly charges one — but no dollar amount is published on the Schedule of Court Costs, the UJS ‘Serving Someone’ page, or either divorce checklist. Minnehaha and Pennington county sites were unreachable. Amount reported as null. | not published |
| Court-ordered mediationNo statewide court-ordered mediation fee or program is published in the UJS divorce self-help materials. Unlike North Dakota, South Dakota publishes no state-funded family mediation program with a stated cost. | not published |
| E-filing fee / credit-card surchargeUJS operates an online payment portal (‘UJS ePay’) but publishes no convenience-fee or surcharge amount on the fees-and-costs page or the Schedule of Court Costs. | not published |
| Modification of child custodyUJS-022 lists a distinct ‘Fee for Modification of Child Custody’ as waivable, but the Schedule of Court Costs lists only ‘Child Support Modification: $50.00’. The custody-modification amount is not published, so it is null. Listed as a waivable item on form UJS-022 | not published |
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.
South Dakota 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 form lists four waivable items: ‘Filing Fee’, ‘Answer or Responsive Pleading Filing Fee’, ‘Service Fee’, and ‘Fee for Modification of Child Custody’. Notably this DOES cover sheriff service of process — unlike North Dakota’s waiver.
- What to ask for: UJS-022, ‘Motion, Affidavit, and Order to Waive Filing Fee & Service of Process Fee’ (Rev. 03/2026)
- How it works: File form UJS-022 (Motion, Affidavit, and Order to Waive Filing Fee & Service of Process Fee). A judge reviews the financial affidavit. The clerk responds within five business days; if the judge denies the waiver, the filer has 30 days to pay the fees or the case may be dismissed.
What we could not find out
Open questions on this page
- Could not retrieve the text of SDCL § 16-2-29.2 — sdlegislature.gov returned a fetch authorization failure on every attempt. The $97 and its $50/$40/$7 breakdown are confirmed from the official statewide UJS Schedule of Court Costs and corroborated on two official UJS checklists, but the statutory authority itself is unverified and is reported as such.
- Could not verify SDCL ch. 25-4A as the source of the parenting-education mandate. Form UJS-364 confirms the mandate exists and is a precondition to entry of a final decree, but the form does not print an SDCL section number, and the statute site was unreachable. we did not supply the citation from memory.
- Parenting course FEE: no amount published on any official UJS source. Providers are third parties. Reported null.
- Sheriff service-of-process fee: Not confirmed for any named county. The fee demonstrably exists (it is a waivable line on UJS-022) but no official schedule reachable to me publishes the amount.
- EFFECTIVE-DATE CAUTION: the PDF’s URL slug reads ‘2027-schedule-of-court-costs.pdf’, but the date printed inside the document header is ‘Effective July 1, 2026’. Per the no-inference rule I used the printed date, not the filename. A second table footer inside the document carries an older ‘Effective July 1, 2020’ note for a superseded civil filings table.
- We found no separate decree-entry fee — but that is an absence from three official documents rather than a statement in any of them that no such fee exists.
- Sources we could not read: https://sdlegislature.gov/Statutes/16-2-29.2 — repeated fetch authorization failure; statute text unavailable; https://sdlegislature.gov — fetch authorization failure; https://ujs.sd.gov/Information/filingfees.aspx — fetch authorization failure (superseded path; current fees reached via ujs.sd.gov/self-help/understanding-the-courts/fees-and-costs/); https://www.minnehahacounty.gov/ — fetch authorization failure; sheriff civil process fees unobtainable; https://www.pennco.org/ — fetch authorization failure; sheriff civil process fees unobtainable
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what South Dakota’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 South Dakota 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
South Dakota 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 South Dakota. Every figure is quoted from South Dakota’s own statute or its courts’ own published schedule, and carries the date we last checked it.