What a Wyoming 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 stateWyoming
It costs $160.00 to file for divorce in Wyoming. 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 widely repeated claim that Wyoming is among the cheapest states to file for divorce does not hold up against the current statute: Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(i) sets the original civil filing fee at $160.00 — identical to North Dakota’s and 65% higher than South Dakota’s $97. Wyoming is also the only one of these three states where the parenting class is purely discretionary: § 20-2-201(f) says the court ‘may’ require it, so a Wyoming filer with children may face no class requirement at all.
Where the money goes
Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(i) sets ‘an original filing fee of one hundred sixty dollars ($160.00), which shall be paid by the plaintiff’ and expressly carves out $40 for court automation and $10 for indigent civil legal services. The statute does NOT print a label or figure for the remaining $110 — that number is only arithmetic, so I have deliberately omitted it as a component rather than present a derived figure as a published one.
| Component | Amount |
|---|---|
| Court automation fee (portion of the $160)Statute directs this portion to the judicial systems automation account. This is a carve-out of the $160, not an addition to it. Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(i), remitted per § 5-3-205 | $40.00 |
| Indigent civil legal services fee (portion of the $160)Directed to the indigent civil legal services account. Related program authority at §§ 5-2-121 and 5-2-122. Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(i), remitted per § 5-3-205 | $10.00 |
Does it change by county?
No — the fee is the same everywhere in Wyoming
Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(i) fixes the original civil filing fee at $160.00 statewide, and § 5-3-205 requires clerks to collect it in advance and remit it, with the $40 automation and $10 indigent-legal-services portions going to state accounts. Nothing in Title 5 authorizes a county to add a surcharge to the original filing fee; county-level clerk discretion in § 5-3-206(a)(i) is limited to charges for copies, certifications and transcripts. CAVEAT: I could not open any Wyoming county clerk of district court fee page to confirm no county adds a local charge in practice, so ‘varies: false’ rests on the statute alone.
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 Wyoming 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 Wyoming kit.
| Cost | Amount |
|---|---|
| Docket fee on appeal from circuit court to district courtAllocated identically ($40 automation, $10 indigent civil legal services). Not a divorce cost unless an appeal occurs. Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a) | $100.00 |
| Taking depositions / commission for depositionsClerk’s statutory fee only; does not include the court reporter’s charge. Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(ii)-(iii) | $5.00 (taking depositions); $0.75 (commission for depositions) |
| Affidavits / acknowledgments Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a)(iv) | $0.50 per person |
| Copies of documentsRelevant for obtaining a copy of the decree. Wyo. Stat. § 5-3-206(a) | $1.00 first page; $0.50 each additional page |
| Mandatory parent education classNOT MANDATORY BY STATUTE. § 20-2-201(f): ‘At any time the court may require parents to attend appropriate parenting classes, including but not limited to, parenting classes to lessen the effects of divorce on children.’ This is permissive judicial discretion, not an automatic requirement in cases with minor children, and no fee is set by statute. Individual district courts may impose local requirements, but the Wyoming Judiciary site was unreachable so local rules are unverified. Wyo. Stat. § 20-2-201(f) | not published |
| Court-ordered mediationNo mandatory mediation requirement for divorces with minor children appears in Wyo. Stat. Title 20, ch. 2, and no fee is set there. | not published |
| Sheriff service of process, per respondentTitle 18 of the Wyoming statutes was unreachable, as were all Wyoming county sites attempted. No figure is reported. See the sources we could not reach, below. Wyo. Stat. § 18-3-609 is the sheriff fee provision, but we could not retrieve its text | not published |
| E-filing fee / credit-card surchargeTitle 5 contains no provision for e-filing fees, credit-card surcharges, or electronic payment convenience fees. Absence from the statute does not preclude an administratively imposed surcharge, which I could not check because the Judiciary site was blocked. | not published |
If you cannot afford to file
We could not confirm how a fee waiver works in Wyoming
Almost every state has a way to file without paying up front — usually called proceeding in forma pauperis — but we could not find Wyoming’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
- EFFECTIVE DATE IS NULL. The compiled Title 5 statute text carries no printed effective-date or amendment note for the $160 figure. We have not inferred a date from the URL, the filename, or the compilation year. Treat the figure as current-as-compiled but undated.
- The widely repeated claim that Wyoming is one of the cheapest states to file in is contradicted by the statute itself: the fee is $160.00, not a low double-digit figure. We have not adjusted the number to fit the reputation. If a lower historical figure is in circulation, it predates the current text of § 5-3-206.
- FEE WAIVER ENTIRELY UNCONFIRMED — reported as null, not false. Title 5 contains no waiver provision for indigent civil litigants (§§ 5-2-121/5-2-122 fund legal representation, not fee waivers), and the Wyoming Judiciary website was unreachable at every URL attempted, so no waiver form number and no income threshold could be obtained. This is the single largest gap in the Wyoming record.
- Sheriff’s service-of-process fee: Not confirmed for any named county. Wyoming statute Title 18 was unreachable and no county site could be opened.
- No official statewide Wyoming court fee schedule (as distinct from the statute) was reachable, so the $160 is confirmed from the legislature’s statute text only — a valid official source, but I could not cross-check it against a judiciary-published schedule as I did for North Dakota and South Dakota.
- County-level confirmation is absent entirely; ‘varies: false’ is a statutory inference about authority to charge, not an audited comparison of county schedules.
- Sources we could not read: https://www.courts.state.wy.us/ — fetch authorization failure; https://courts.state.wy.us/ — fetch authorization failure; https://www.courts.state.wy.us/court-forms/ — fetch authorization failure; https://www.courts.state.wy.us/self-help/ — fetch authorization failure; https://www.courts.state.wy.us/legal-assistance-and-self-help/ — fetch authorization failure
We would rather show you a blank than a plausible number. Everything above is a real limit on what Wyoming’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 Wyoming 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
Wyoming attorneys, mediators, CDFAs and therapists, credentials checked against the state’s own records. Nobody paid to be there.