Court costs for all 50 states and DC · every figure cited to an official source · researched September 2026
Filing an eviction is cheap. South Carolina charges $40 to file, serve and remove a tenant. Idaho charges $781. That 19x spread is real, and it is also almost beside the point — because the court's invoice is the smallest number in this whole exercise. The money that actually hurts is the rent that never arrives while the case grinds forward, and the unit sitting empty afterward.
So this page does two things. Below is the court-cost data for every US jurisdiction, each figure traced to a court fee schedule, a sheriff's published schedule, or a statute you can open and read yourself. Above that sits a calculator that takes those court costs and adds the part that decides whether an eviction costs you a few hundred dollars or a few thousand.
Informational only — not legal advice.
Court costs change, vary by county, and sometimes vary by the amount you are suing for. Everything here is cited so you can verify it against the source before you rely on it. Confirm current fees with your court clerk before filing, and talk to a licensed attorney about your actual case.
Eviction cost calculator
Court costs fill in from the data below. You supply the two numbers only you know: your rent, and how long you realistically go unpaid.
Court costs load automatically, with sources.
What this unit actually rents for.
Missed rent before filing, plus the case itself. Three is a common real-world figure, not a published statistic — change it to match your situation.
Turn time before the next tenant pays.
Leave at 0 if you file yourself. Contested cases run far higher.
Beyond what the deposit covers.
Estimated total cost of this eviction
$0
How long does it take?
We deliberately do not publish our own eviction timelines, because a better source already exists and ours would be a worse copy of it. The Eviction Research Network at UC Berkeley rebuilt the statutory clock for all 51 jurisdictions from primary law, stage by stage, with a citation and an effective date on every element. Their finding: the fastest lawful nonpayment eviction runs between 5 and 56 days, and most states set no statutory ceiling at all.
Read their numbers as the floor, not the forecast. A statutory minimum assumes the tenant never answers, never asks for a continuance, never raises a defect in your notice, and that the court has a hearing slot open. That is not how most cases go, which is why the calculator above asks how many months you expect to go unpaid rather than quoting a legal minimum back at you.
Court costs, state by state
Filing fee plus service of process plus writ of possession, for the states where all three are published. Sorted high to low. Hover or tap a bar for the breakdown.
The full data
Every dollar figure below links to the official source it came from. Where a state does not publish a figure, this table says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate — those blanks are findings, not omissions. Details in methodology.
On a phone, scroll the table sideways to reach the service, writ and sourcing columns.
State
Court & case type
Filing
Service
Writ
Known total
Sourcing
The cheapest eviction is the one you never file
Look at what the calculator just told you. The court took a couple hundred dollars. The tenant took the rest. Every dollar above that filing fee traces back to one decision made months earlier: who got the keys.
That is not a lecture about being pickier. Most landlords who end up in housing court did screen their tenant — they just did it with a rental application in a text message, a landlord reference that was actually the applicant's friend, and a gut feeling on a Saturday afternoon because the unit had been empty for three weeks and the mortgage was due. Vacancy pressure is what makes people skip steps. Here is how LandlordPro takes the pressure off.
Get the unit in front of enough people that you can afford to say no
Your listing syndicates to Zillow, the largest rental marketplace in the country, straight from LandlordPro. This is the step that does the most work, because a bigger applicant pool is what makes standards affordable. One applicant means you take that applicant. Ten means you get to choose — and choosing is the entire ballgame.
Take real applications instead of text messages
Build an application in a few minutes and send one link. Answers come back structured and comparable, in one place, so you are reading the same fields for every applicant instead of reconstructing a picture from screenshots. It also means you are asking everyone the same questions, which is exactly what you want to be able to say later if anyone ever asks how you chose.
Set your standards once, in writing, before you meet anyone
Decide your thresholds up front — income relative to rent, credit floor, prior eviction judgments, verifiable income, pets, smoking — and apply them to every applicant identically. Standards written down in advance beat a judgment call made under vacancy pressure, every time. And the written record of a consistent standard applied to everyone is the single most useful thing you can have if an applicant ever claims they were treated differently.
Let a licensed agency run the background and credit check
Screening runs through RentPrep, an FCRA-regulated consumer reporting agency that has been doing tenant background checks since 2007. That is deliberate. Pulling consumer reports is a regulated activity with real legal obligations attached, including how adverse decisions must be communicated. RentPrep carries that; LandlordPro is not the one making the call on anyone's report, and neither is a piece of software guessing. You get a professional report, and the compliance sits with the licensed party where it belongs.
A word on what you may not filter on, because it costs more than an eviction. Your standards can be about money and verifiable history — income, credit, prior judgments, payment record. They cannot be about who a person is. Race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability and familial status are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, and many states and cities protect more, including source of income and marital status.
LandlordPro will not generate listing copy or application fields that describe the occupant rather than the property, and that is a deliberate product decision rather than an oversight. A single "no kids" or "adults preferred" in an ad you syndicated is a bigger financial event than every eviction on this page combined. Standard federal penalties start in the five figures, before anyone's legal bills. Screen on the money. Never on the person.
Fill the unit faster, and fill it with someone who pays
Listing syndication, applications, your screening standards, RentPrep checks, rent tracking and the records you'll want at tax time — in one place, for less than the writ of possession costs in most states. Start free, and your first month of any paid plan is on us.
Three figures were collected for each of the 51 jurisdictions: the court fee to file an eviction, the service of process fee to have the summons delivered, and the writ of possession fee to have the tenant physically removed. Research was done in September 2026.
What counted as a source
State judiciary and court system websites, published court fee schedules including PDFs, county sheriff and clerk of court fee pages, and statutes that set the fee amount. Every cited URL was opened and confirmed to contain the figure. Secondary sources — legal content sites, law firm blogs, other landlord software companies' "eviction by state" pages — were not accepted as a source for any figure, at any point.
Why some cells are blank
Where no official source published a figure, the cell reads "not published" and stays empty. It was never filled with an estimate, an average, a rounded guess, or a zero. This matters more than it sounds: a tidy complete table would have been easy to produce and would have been partly fiction. Several blanks are not research failures but real facts about how a state works — North Carolina bills the sheriff's actual expenses to execute a judgment rather than charging a flat fee, Utah's filing fee scales with the amount you are suing for, and Wyoming and West Virginia leave service fees to each county.
County variation
Many states set these fees at county or court-district level rather than statewide. Where that is the case, the row is marked county-set and uses the state's most populous county, named in the table. Your county may differ. Rows marked statewide are set by statute or by a single state court fee schedule.
Known weak spots, stated plainly
Kansas figures come from a Johnson County self-help packet dated 2014 and should be treated as approximate. Mississippi substitutes DeSoto County because Hinds County figures could not be retrieved. Colorado's plaintiff-side filing fee could not be confirmed current on any official state source. New Hampshire has two official sources that disagree with each other, and both are shown. Wisconsin's sheriff fees roughly triple on 1 November 2026 under 2025 Wisconsin Act 179; the figures here are the rates in force now. The sourcing column flags confidence on every row.
What is not included
These are court system costs only. Attorney fees, lost rent, turnover, repairs, damage beyond the deposit, and your own time are not in the data — the calculator adds those from your inputs, and they are almost always the larger number. Timelines are not included either; see how long does it take.
Use this data
The dataset is free to use with attribution. Download it as or . Both exports carry every source URL and as-of date alongside the figures, so nothing is stripped of its provenance. Each state row has its own anchor link for citing a single jurisdiction.
Journalists and researchers: the source column is the point of this page. If you find an error, or a figure we marked unavailable that your state does publish, corrections are welcome at support and will be credited.
Cite this
Timeline data referenced on this page is the work of the Eviction Research Network at UC Berkeley and is cited, not reproduced. See State Eviction Timeframes.
State eviction guides
Procedure, notice requirements and statutes for each jurisdiction:
