How much court fees

The different types of fees are explained below. If you cannot afford the court fees, you may be able to get them waived which means set aside or forgiven by the court. A filing fee is the amount of money you must pay to the court to begin your court case. The amount of money you have to pay depends on the court and the type of case.

You may have to pay other filing fees at certain times during your case. The court clerk can give you a list of all the filing fees for your court case so you know the total cost. Filing fees are usually not required in domestic violence cases. And, most courts do not require filing fees for family law cases such as child custody and child support. If you did not start the case, you do not have to pay filing fees.

Are there any other fees that I should expect to pay in my court case? Though this alternative might be pitched as a benefit to those who want to discharge their debt in this manner, no one who has a choice and can make other payment arrangements would choose jail.

Further, many defendants have no say in the matter. For example, one magistrate judge in Socorro County, New Mexico, jails individuals for missing three payments without making a court appearance, regardless of ability to pay. Perversely, people can accumulate additional fees during their stay in jail, leaving them with more debt than when they entered. In some states, including Alabama, Michigan, and Texas, when people are picked up on a warrant for a failure to pay traffic tickets or fines, they may be jailed involuntarily to pay off delinquent criminal justice debt through credits issued for each day spent in jail.

These credits do not generate actual revenue but simply exchange jail time for debt reduction at a great cost to the government. Jailing also comes at great cost to the people affected and their families. The U. Supreme Court has held that imprisonment for unpaid fines or fees without a hearing to determine ability to pay is unconstitutional. Georgia, U. If courts find that a defendant is unable to pay, they are required to consider alternatives, such as deferrals, payment plans, community service, and waivers.

Unfortunately, in practice, many courts fail to make these financial determinations. Community service credits. Most states offer some type of community service option as an alternative to payment, though these practices vary significantly within and across states.

Some states offer programs assigning people to pick up trash or maintain parks in lieu of a jail sentence or fine, while other states allow people to meet educational requirements to pay off their debt. Some types of community service require classes for certification e. In some states, community service is seldom available to defendants because judges feel pressure to raise revenue for their city or county.

This is even harder if they have jobs or are caring for family members. The costs of fee and fine enforcement are huge. Because of a lack of available data, this figure counts only in-court and jail costs. The authors were not able to estimate a number of costs, such as time spent by law enforcement, DMV employees, probation and parole officers, and others. Compare these collection costs to the cost of raising revenue through taxation. In other words, it costs jurisdictions, on average, times more to collect criminal fees and fines even without including some of those costs — than it costs the IRS to gather taxes.

Fees and fines are most often evaluated by courts and criminal justice agencies, legislators, and policymakers on the basis of the revenue they generate, but they come at a great cost to the criminal justice system. When criminal courts impose fees and fines and then spend much of their resources collecting them, this leaves less to spend on true public safety needs. For example:. These are just a few examples; there are many more ways in which criminal justice agency efforts to coerce payment translates into less time spent on more valuable criminal justice work.

Put concretely and in dollar terms, almost every cent spent on fee and fine collection is wasted as compared to collecting tax revenue. State tax authorities in some cases spend more or less than the IRS cost, but the argument still holds that much of the fee and fine cost represents waste or funds that could be put to better use.

This is a fundamentally inefficient way to collect revenue to support courts and other criminal justice agencies, and it does not make fiscal or economic sense. One reason that fees and fines are so inefficient as a revenue raiser is that each year millions of people are given sentences that include fines and fees they are simply unable to pay. From watching more than 1, court proceedings in seven jurisdictions, the authors found that judges rarely hold ability-to-pay hearings.

While there are plainly up-front costs associated with such hearings, in the long run, jurisdictions would spend less money by holding them rather than trying to chase down debts that cannot be paid. Still, states and localities continue to jail large numbers of indigent defendants as a sanction for unpaid criminal justice debt.

Jailing people for nonpayment is by far the most expensive method of enforcing collections and generates little to no revenue making it highly uneconomical. In counties where courts incarcerate for failure to pay, the authors found that the cost of incarceration dwarfs other collections costs. For example, in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, jail costs represent as much as 98 percent of the collection costs documented by the authors.

Cost data calculated through a combination of court watching, surveys, and analysis of credits see Appendix B: Methodology. Often when someone is unable or unwilling to pay a fee or fine, the court issues a warrant.

Frequently, indigent people do not appear on their court date, due to a transportation issue they may have had their license suspended , or because they have to work, or because they fear arrest for nonpayment. In these instances, courts often issue a warrant for failure to appear, resulting in additional debt for the defendant and, in some jurisdictions, jail time.

Some defendents receive credit toward their debt at a state-determined per diem rate for the time they spend in custody; others incur additional debt in the form of jail fees; and some are released still owing the amount they owed before the warrant was issued.

XLVI; Tex. Penal Code. A substantial portion of fees and fines is never collected and is likely uncollectable, meaning that these assessments are an unreliable source of government revenue that will always come up short. No one knows how much is owed in total because few states and courts track this information — which is itself a problem requiring attention.

And in each of the jurisdictions studied here, the amount of unpaid debt grew significantly over the period examined. Much of this debt is unlikely to ever be collected, as those with low incomes lack resources to draw on for payment.

This high level of uncollected debt demonstrates why fees and fines are such an unreliable way to raise revenue. Audio recordings of court proceedings continue to be governed by a separate fee in item 9 of this schedule.

The court may charge and collect fees commensurate with the cost of providing copies of the local rules of court. The court may also distribute copies of the local rules without charge. Other costs in that chart also might apply, like an additional fee if you previously failed to appear during the course of the case, daily fees to reimburse the county for any days spent in jail before your case was disposed, and additional fees for conviction of certain kinds of offenses like impaired driving or having improper equipment on a motor vehicle.

In addition to court costs, the court might impose other monetary obligations in its judgment, like a fine as punishment, restitution to any victim s of the offense, attorney fees to pay back the State for a court-appointed lawyer, and other costs or fees associated with certain conditions of probation like a fee for the community service program.

The current lists of waivable offenses and the fines to be imposed. If you were placed on supervised probation, you can make a partial payment of the total due. If you are pleading guilty via waiver or are making a payment for a judgment that imposed unsupervised probation or no probation at all , then the payment must be for the full amount due; partial payments against those cases are not accepted. The name on the card and the name of the defendant may be different.

The secure payment vendor, NIC, Inc. For online payment problems, contact NIC, Inc. By Mail Payment can be made by mail to the clerk of superior court in the county where you were charged. Do not send cash through the mail. Personal checks will not be accepted. If mailing a payment in order to plead guilty via waiver, be sure to sign and date the written waiver on your citation and include it with the payment, or your case will remain pending, and you still must appear for your court date.

Monetary obligations from criminal and infraction cases are due at the time of the conviction, but in some cases, payment might be delayed to a later date or paid over time. If your conviction results in probation, payment usually can be made any time during the period of probation.

If your probation is supervised, your probation officer will discuss with you the expected schedule of payments. As explained above, monetary obligations from a criminal or infraction judgment are due as soon as the judgment is imposed, though the court might allow you additional time to pay.