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Family law guide
Part of: Divorce Specialists
The short answer How much does a divorce cost? In England and Wales it starts at a fixed £628. That is the court fee to apply for the divorce order. It is the same online or on paper, and you pay it once however many people put their names on the application (GOV.UK: “There’s a £628 fee to apply for a divorce”). Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate legal systems with their own courts and their own, different fees. We price both further down this page.
Everything above that figure is a choice, not a rule. Three later decisions set what a divorce will actually cost you. Do you need the court to deal with the money? Do the two of you agree? Will anyone apply to court about the children? Where all three answers are simple, a divorce comes to £690 in court fees. That is the £628 plus £62 to make your financial agreement binding, with a fixed professional fee on top. Where none of them is simple, it can run into five figures each. Yet almost none of that is court fees.
“Filing an application for a divorce, nullity or civil partnership dissolution (fees order 1.2) — £628” — Family court fees, EX50, updated 13 July 2026
This guide prices the whole thing. It covers every court fee a divorce can involve in 2026 and the usual professional fee on top. It also shows where people quietly pay twice. Most of it is the law of England and Wales. We set out the Scottish and Northern Irish fees separately, so you can see where you stand. If you want the procedure rather than the price, start with our guide to no fault divorce. Our divorce specialists deal with these cost questions every week.
It is £628 in England and Wales. GOV.UK states the figure plainly on the page you apply from. The same amount appears at fees order 1.2 of the fee schedule the courts themselves work from. The government reviews fees periodically, so check the current EX50 table on the day you file.
Two things about that number surprise people. The first is that the court charges it per application, not per person. If you apply jointly, one fee covers both of you. The two of you then decide privately who actually pays it. The second is that it buys the divorce and nothing else. It does not buy a decision about the house, the pensions, the savings or the children. Those are separate applications, on separate forms, with separate fees, and skipping them is where the real money is lost.
| What you are asking the court to do | Fee | Fees order | When it falls due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apply for a divorce, nullity or dissolution | £628 | 1.2 | When you file the application. Everyone pays this one. |
| Amend the application after filing | £61 | 1.5 | Only if something on the application needs correcting. |
| Ask the court to approve a financial order you have both agreed | £62 | 5.1 | When the agreed order and the statement of information go in. |
| Apply for a financial order you have not agreed | £321 | 5.4 | When the application starts contested financial proceedings. |
| Start a new Children Act 1989 application | £270 | 2.1 | Only if a judge has to decide child arrangements. |
| Ask the court for something else mid-case, on notice | £195 | 5.3 | Any application on notice that has no fee of its own — extending time, chasing disclosure, adjourning a hearing. |
| Have the application served by a court bailiff | £47 | 15.1 | Only if your spouse will not acknowledge the application. The court then has to arrange service. |
| Apply for a non-molestation or occupation order | No fee | — | If you need protection from abuse. The court charges no fee for either. |
No. Every figure above is the same in Wrexham as it is in Warwick. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 extends to England and Wales. There is “a court in England and Wales, called the family court” for both (Matrimonial and Family Proceedings Act 1984, s.31A). The EX50 fee table also sets one divorce fee with no Welsh variation.
Two things are genuinely different in Wales, and neither of them is the price. Both affect your timetable, which is the thing that actually drives what your divorce will cost.
How you apply. The online divorce service takes applications in English. GOV.UK’s instruction to a Welsh speaker is explicit: “If you’re a Welsh speaker, you can apply by post using the divorce application form D8 (Welsh)”. The fee does not move. The £628 attaches to the application, and EX50 draws no distinction between the online and the paper route. But you are posting a form rather than submitting one online. So give the Welsh route a little more lead time when you count forward to the 20-week point. Our page on the D8 form covers the paper route.
What language a hearing runs in. Suppose the money or the children do reach a judge. In any legal proceedings in Wales, the Welsh language “may be spoken by any party, witness or other person who desires to use it” (Welsh Language Act 1993, s.22), with interpretation provided. Raise it when the court lists the hearing, not on the morning of it. An adjournment because nobody asked in time is the most expensive kind of delay there is.
So the table above is your price list wherever in England or Wales you are. What a Welsh case changes is the planning. Are you on the postal route? Do you want a hearing conducted in Welsh? And how do both sit against the 20-week clock? Those are twenty-minute questions, and they are cheaper to ask before you file than after.
Our Cardiff office covers Wales, and you can book a free 15-minute consultation at a time you choose.
Different law, different courts, different fees. Neither Scotland nor Northern Ireland uses the EX50 table, so none of the figures above applies there.
Scotland. Divorce runs through the sheriff court. On the fee table that applies from 1 April 2026, a simplified divorce or dissolution application is £156. In contrast, an ordinary divorce or dissolution action is £191 (Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, sheriff court fees). You can use the simplified route only where there are no children under 16 and no financial claims. That is the same trap as in England and Wales in a different costume. The cheap route is cheap because it does not deal with the money.
Northern Ireland. You pay £326 to lodge the petition. A court date then costs £407 in the County Court or £488 in the High Court. Finally, the decree absolute is a further £123 (nidirect, Getting a divorce or dissolving a civil partnership). Unlike England and Wales, a court date is a normal part of the process rather than an exception. As a result, the total sits higher.
Kabir Family Law acts in England and Wales. Ask which country’s court should deal with your divorce before anyone files. The answer can change what you end up with. If it is Scotland or Northern Ireland, you need a firm qualified there.
The divorce order ends the marriage. It does not divide anything. A financial order deals with the finances. It is a separate application to the same court, and the fee depends entirely on whether you have already agreed.
If you have agreed, you send the court the order you want made plus a statement of information. The fee is £62. GOV.UK is clear that this is not a rubber stamp: “A judge will approve your consent order to make it legally binding if they think it’s fair. If they do not think it’s fair, they can ask you to change it.” An order that comes back for changes costs time, and time is where professional fees live. Our page on how much a financial order costs takes that application apart in detail.
Here the application costs £321, and it starts a court timetable rather than ending one. Before you can make it, you normally have to attend a mediation information and assessment meeting. That is because the statute says so: “Before making a relevant family application, a person must attend a family mediation information and assessment meeting” (Children and Families Act 2014, s.10(1)). There are exemptions, including where there has been domestic abuse. Our guide to the financial settlement after divorce sets out what that process involves. Form H and H1 is the document on which the court makes each side declare what the case has cost so far.
The single most expensive misunderstanding on this page. People routinely pay £628 and receive a final order. They then believe the financial side is closed, because nobody sent them a bill for it. It is not closed. It is simply not dealt with.
Not sure whether anyone dealt with yours? That is a two-minute answer on a free 15-minute consultation, and an expensive thing to find out in ten years’ time.
Potentially far more than the divorce. A divorce order does not extinguish financial claims. Unless the court has dealt with them they stay open. The statute shuts only one specific door: a party who remarries “shall not be entitled to apply, by reference to the grant or making of that decree or order, for a financial provision order in his or her favour, or for a property adjustment order” (Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, s.28(3)). Those two orders are the only ones that subsection names. So remarriage does not tidy the finances away, but it can quietly remove a claim you did not know you still had. Have that conversation before you set a new wedding date, not after.
The consequence is not theoretical. In Wyatt v Vince the parties separated in 1984 and divorced in 1992. The former wife issued a financial remedy application in 2011. On 11 March 2015 the Supreme Court set aside the strike-out. It allowed her application to proceed to a hearing. Nineteen years after the divorce, the claim was still live, because nothing had ever closed it.
Put in cost terms, the £62 consent order is the cheapest insurance a divorce can buy. It is the only thing that turns an agreement into a court-approved order the other side cannot walk away from later. People skip it to save £62 and a few hundred pounds of professional time. No decision is more likely to cost you a five-figure sum a decade from now.
Every divorce clients ask us to reopen years later has the same missing document. Would a judge approve your agreement? Does it close the claims you think it closes? That is exactly what a first conversation is for.
Into correspondence, disclosure and hearings, in that order. The divorce application itself takes very little professional time, which is why firms commonly offer it as a fixed fee. Published fixed fees for a straightforward, agreed divorce sat between roughly £600 and £800 including VAT. That was the range when we checked in September 2026. You pay the £628 court fee on top, and firms usually price a consent order separately, commonly from around £1,200. What is not fixed is everything that happens because the two of you see the same set of facts differently.
Predictable work, priced in advance.
Open-ended work, and the reason two divorces differ tenfold.
Kabir Family Law offers a fixed fee divorce advisory service where both parties agree the divorce and it simply needs legally finalising. The terms sit on our divorce specialists page. We quote you the figure on the free consultation, before any work starts, not after. Ask us, and anyone else you speak to, the two questions that matter more than the headline number. What exactly does the fixed fee stop covering? And what is the first thing likely to take my case out of it? In practice the answer is almost always the same three things: a financial disagreement, missing disclosure, or a children application. If the answer you get is vague, the fee is not really fixed.
Pricing the genuinely cheapest possible route? Read honestly about doing it yourself, including what that route does and does not protect you from. Will either of you ask the other to pay their costs? That is a separate question with its own rules, which our page about family law costs covers.
The divorce timetable is set by statute, so you cannot buy speed. Knowing when each payment falls due is the difference between a budgeted divorce and a surprising one.
Answer three questions and the sheet below shows the court fees your route involves, and what each one buys. It totals published England and Wales fees only. It cannot tell you how much the professional side of your divorce will cost. That turns on facts no form can ask you about, which is exactly the part worth a phone call.
Published fees only, from the EX50 table updated 13 July 2026. Nothing you choose leaves this page.
Answer all three and your fee sheet appears here.
Your court-fee total appears once you answer all three.Court fees on this route: £
These are the published court fees only. They do not include professional fees, valuations, or anything a contested case adds.
Our free consultation is 15 minutes by telephone with a senior member of the team, at a time you pick. If you are outside the UK, we can use WhatsApp or Zoom. You leave knowing which of those three applies to you. You also learn what a realistic fixed fee for your situation looks like. It is advice on your circumstances; it does not include drafting or reviewing documents.
Almost none of the waste is in the filing fees. It is in decisions that looked like savings at the time.
It depends which part of the UK you are in, because there are three separate systems. In England and Wales the court fees are £628 for the divorce. Add £62 for an agreed financial order or £321 for a contested one. A children application adds £270 if you need one. In Scotland a simplified divorce application is £156 and an ordinary action £191. In Northern Ireland it is £326 to lodge the petition, plus £407 or £488 for a court date. The decree absolute is another £123. On top of that sits the professional fee. When we checked in September 2026, that was roughly £600 to £800 including VAT for a straightforward agreed divorce. Where the finances are genuinely in dispute, it can reach five figures each.
Whoever files the application pays the court. If you apply jointly, the court still charges the fee once. The two of you then decide privately how to share it. There is nothing in the fee rules that splits it for you. If your ex applied and paid, you owe the court nothing for the divorce itself. No further court fee falls due at the conditional or final order stages.
Applying online, jointly, with the finances already agreed and recorded in a consent order. That keeps court fees to £690 in total and professional time to a minimum. Agreement removes the two things that make a divorce cost more: repeated correspondence and contested hearings. Going cheaper still, by skipping the financial order, is not a saving at all — it leaves the claims open. For the fully unassisted route, our page on divorcing without professional help sets out honestly what you take on.
No. It ends the marriage and nothing else. Dividing the finances requires a financial order. That is a separate application with its own fee: £62 by consent or £321 if contested. Our page on how much a financial order costs covers that application. This is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding about what a divorce will cost.
Under the current law nobody really contests the divorce itself. The application does not have to prove anything about the other person’s behaviour. Instead, the dispute is over the money, or the arrangements for children, and that is where the figure comes from. A contested financial case means disclosure, valuations, negotiation and hearings. In fact, the court fee of £321 will be the smallest line on the bill by a wide margin. The court requires each side to file a costs estimate on Form H as the case goes on. That way nobody has to guess.
Two ways, and the difference matters more than the headline figure. A fixed fee covers a defined piece of work. That might be the divorce application itself, or drafting a consent order on terms you have already agreed. Published fixed fees for a straightforward agreed divorce were roughly £600 to £800 including VAT. That was the range when we checked in September 2026, with the £628 court fee on top. Hourly charging applies where nobody can yet see the end of the work. That means any case where the money or the children are genuinely in dispute. Ask two questions of anyone you speak to. What exactly does the fixed fee stop covering? And what is the first thing likely to take this case out of it? A free 15-minute consultation will tell you which of the two fits your situation, and what our figure would be.
You pay the £628 when you file the application; it is not spread over the case. The later stages, the conditional order and the final order, carry no fee at all. There is nothing further to budget for on the divorce itself. If paying it in one go is the obstacle, raise it before you file rather than after. HM Courts and Tribunals Service runs a separate application that can reduce or remove a court fee. Our guide to the EX160 form covers it.
It is neither cheaper nor dearer. Divorce is one law across England and Wales, and the EX50 table sets one fee wherever you file. That means the divorce will cost £628, a financial order £62 or £321, and a children application £270. The Welsh differences are practical rather than financial. A Welsh speaker applies by post on the Welsh version of form D8 instead of through the online service. Section 22 of the Welsh Language Act 1993 lets any party or witness speak Welsh in legal proceedings in Wales. The necessary interpretation comes with it.
Each has its own price list, because they are separate legal systems. Scotland is the cheapest of the three on court fees. From 1 April 2026, the sheriff court charges £156 for a simplified divorce application or £191 for an ordinary action. Northern Ireland is the dearest. It costs £326 to lodge the petition, then £407 for a County Court date or £488 in the High Court. The decree absolute adds £123. England and Wales sits in between at £628. You do not get to choose the cheapest, though. Which country’s court can deal with your divorce is a legal question, not a shopping decision. It turns on your and your spouse’s domicile or habitual residence.
You cannot pay to go faster in England and Wales. Statute sets two waiting periods. You wait 20 weeks before you can confirm you want the divorce to continue. Then 6 weeks must pass from the conditional order before it can be made final. No fee shortens either. What changes the overall length, and therefore how much the divorce costs, is how quickly you resolve the financial side. That is entirely within the two of you.
The court fees on this page are fixed and public. What your situation needs is not. That is the part worth fifteen minutes before you file anything. The call is free, by telephone with a senior member of the team at a time you choose. You come off it knowing what a realistic fixed fee looks like for your circumstances. You also learn the one decision most likely to save you money.
Book a free 15-minute consultation or call 0330 094 5880
You can also read our guide to no fault divorce, or go back to our divorce specialists page.
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Short videos from the Kabir Family Law team, explaining family law in plain English.
We are a team of legally trained family law and divorce specialists with years of experience across all areas of family law. We are not part of a firm of solicitors, do not undertake legal reserved activities unless permitted and are therefore entirely independent. Please subscribe to our mailing list.
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