How Much Does a Divorce Cost in New York? $335 Is the Only Fixed Price

$335 is the part with an exact answer

New York does not estimate its court fees. It legislates them, in the Civil Practice Law and Rules, and the amounts are the same whether you file in Manhattan or in Chautauqua County.

• $210, index number (CPLR 8018(a)). $190 for the index number, plus $5 to the records management fund and $15 to the cultural education account. Buying the index number is what starts the case.
• $95, request for judicial intervention (CPLR 8020(a)). The filing that puts the case in front of a judge.
• $30, note of issue (CPLR 8020(a)). The additional amount for placing the cause on the calendar. The statute sets $125 for the two together.

That is $335, and it is the number to hold on to, because it is the only figure in the answer to this question that somebody can be wrong about in a checkable way.

One more you will probably pay: $8 for a certified copy of the judgment. $8 in New York City, the Bronx, Kings, Queens, Richmond, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland; $4 in every other county. Most people need at least one, to change a name or a title or a beneficiary.

Everything above $335 is hours

There is no second price list. A divorce lawyer's bill is time multiplied by a rate, and of the two numbers only the rate is ever published.

Clio puts the average US rate for family law work at $344 an hour and the average New York lawyer at $426 against a national $349. New York therefore runs about 22% above the national rate, and applying that to the family law figure gives roughly $420 an hour for this work in New York. That is a derived number, not a measured one, and it is used below purely as a multiplier so the arithmetic stays visible.

The survey's own respondents reported paying $270 on average, nationally, and the spread underneath that average is the more useful fact.

20% of them were in the top band. That band, rather than the $270 average, is where a New York quote is going to sit, because New York is one of the states pulling that average up in the first place.

The reported totals, turned back into hours

Here is the part every competing page leaves out. A total cost is useless to somebody holding an invoice. Hours are not.

So: take each total the survey reports, subtract New York's $335 in court fees, and divide by the $270 its own respondents said they paid. What comes out is the number of lawyer hours that total represents. Then re-price those hours at $420.

Reported totals are Martindale-Nolo Research's, 2019, national. Implied hours and the New York column are ours, computed as described above. They are a model, not a measurement, and no case is obliged to resemble them.

Three things fall out of that table.

An uncontested divorce with a lawyer is about 14 hours of work. Not a week of work. Two days. If a quote for an uncontested divorce is a large multiple of $6,192, the useful question is which hours are being added and why.

Disagreeing is the expensive decision, and going to trial is a second expensive decision on top of it. Settling after a dispute runs about 38 hours. Taking one issue to trial runs about 74. That single difference, roughly $15,244 in New York money, is what one unresolved issue costs.

The second contested issue is nearly free by comparison. Going from one tried issue to two or more adds about 11 hours, against the 36 the first one added. Most of the cost of a trial is the trial existing at all.

The court's price list also charges you for fighting

The $335 covers a case that behaves. The statute has a second set of fees that appear only when somebody asks a judge to decide something.

Amounts set by statute. Where a fee has two figures, the higher one applies in New York City and the surrounding counties the section names, and the column shows the higher.

Notice the shape of it. Filing a stipulation of settlement costs $35. Each motion costs $45. The court charges you slightly less for agreeing than for arguing.

The court's version of that incentive is trivial. Your lawyer's version is not: a motion is a few hours of drafting, a reply, an appearance and the wait. At $420 an hour, the $45 filing fee is the smallest part of what a motion costs by a factor of tens.

Two ways the fees drop to nothing

You can ask to have them waived. The section that does it is CPLR 1101, motion to waive costs, fees, and expenses. A party who swears out an affidavit of their income and assets showing they lack sufficient means may be relieved of the costs, fees and expenses entirely. A party represented by a legal aid society or a nonprofit legal services organisation gets the waiver without having to move for it.

And an uncontested divorce does not require a lawyer. The New York courts publish a free, guided program that produces the uncontested divorce papers by asking questions, and the court fees are the only cost. That is the $335 floor being a real floor rather than a rhetorical one.

Neither of those is advice about your own case, and an uncontested divorce that involves property, a pension or children is uncontested only until somebody reads the paperwork. But a page about the cost of a divorce that does not mention that the fees can be waived is not describing the cost of a divorce.

What divorce firms themselves publish about price

Everything above is somebody else's research. This last part is ours, and it answers the question the research cannot: before you call anybody, what can you find out?

This directory holds 42 firms that do family law work, all of them in New York, and every page each one publishes about itself has been read.

• 17 of 42 offer a free consultation.
• 5 of 42 say anywhere on the site how they charge, meaning hourly, flat fee or retainer.
• 1 of 42 prints any dollar figure at all in the context of fees.
• None publishes a price for the divorce itself.

That last pair of lines is the finding. Across all 1,412 firms in this directory, in every practice area and every state, exactly one prints a dollar figure anywhere near the subject of fees. It is a family law firm, and what it prints is the price of the first meeting rather than the price of the case.

That is the state of the market, and it is why an article like this one has to be built out of a statute and a survey. The firms that know the answer to "how much does a divorce cost" have collectively decided not to publish it, so a person shopping is left with a court fee schedule and somebody else's average.

Which makes the first phone call the whole of your price research, so it is worth going in with the right questions: what is the hourly rate and whose, what is the retainer and what happens when it runs out, how are paralegal hours billed, and what does it cost to bring one motion. We have written the injury version of that list, and the family law firms in this directory are scored partly on whether they answer any of it in public.

Where these figures come from

The court fees are quoted from the statute. Each one links to the section that sets it, on the New York State Senate's own publication of the law. They are exact and they are not our figures.

The cost outcomes are a survey, and a limited one. Martindale-Nolo Research ran it in 2019, United States. Its limits, which matter more than the numbers:

• Respondents volunteered: they had given an email address while researching how to hire a divorce lawyer, so the sample is people who were shopping for one.
• It is national. Nothing in it is specific to New York.
• It reports what people remembered paying, not what any firm billed.

We use it anyway, because the alternative sources on this question are law firms estimating their own market. But we use it as hours rather than as dollars, and we show the conversion, so a reader who thinks the survey is wrong can put a different total in and get a different answer out.

The rates come from the same tables as our article on lawyer hourly rates, published by Clio from its own customers' billing records. The $420 used here is derived rather than published, as described above.

The counts of what firms publish are ours, computed from the 1,412 firms in this directory each time this page is built. They describe what those firms put on their own websites. We hold no billing data and we have asked no firm what it charges.