Alabama Court Filing Fees by County

How Alabama court filing fees are actually set

Alabama's eviction filing fee varies by county, and it varies upward from a statutory floor that almost no county actually charges. Ala. Code § 12-19-71 sets a base district court docket fee of $198 for civil cases between $3,000.01 and $20,000, the bracket an unlawful detainer case normally falls into, plus $35 and $109 for smaller small-claims brackets. Every one of the nine counties we checked charges more than the $198 figure for that bracket: $247 in Montgomery and Etowah, $256 in Mobile, $261 in Jefferson, $262 in Lowndes, $277 in Baldwin, $293 in Wilcox, $299 in Shelby, and $302 in Madison. The gap is not a mistake on the county's part — Alabama lets individual counties add their own court-cost surcharges by local act (see, for example, the local law provisions for Baldwin County in Ala. Code Title 45, Chapter 2, Article 8, Part 1, which earmark added court-cost money for things like the county law library and judicial administration fund), on top of the statewide base. We also found a documentation trap worth naming: Mobile County's and Montgomery County's own 'Unlawful Detainers' instruction sheets both say, in identical wording, that 'the initial filing fee is $350.00' — a figure that matches neither county's own official fee chart ($256 in Mobile, $247 in Montgomery). That $350 appears to be old boilerplate text copied onto both counties' instruction pages rather than a real, current number, and we did not use it anywhere on this site. Where a county's fee chart and its unlawful-detainer instruction page agreed with each other, as they did in Shelby ($299 both places) and Wilcox ($293 both places), we trusted that agreement; where they disagreed, we used the itemized fee chart, because it is the document a clerk's office keeps current for billing purposes.

The statutory caps

This is the statewide statutory floor set by Ala. Code § 12-19-71, not a schedule any county we checked actually bills. Every county's own fee chart adds a local surcharge on top of these numbers, so treat this table as the legal minimum, not the number a clerk will ask you for.

Source: Ala. Code § 12-19-71; § 6-6-330, Circuit and District Court Filing Fee — Amount; unlawful detainer jurisdiction. Ala. Code § 12-19-71, as amended by Act 2004-636. Act 2004-636 set the current tiered docket fee structure and, in its own text, specifically preserved 'any local court filing fees established by local act,' which is the legal hook counties use to charge more than the statewide figure. § 6-6-330 separately makes unlawful detainer 'cognizable before the district court of the county in which the offense is committed,' which is what keeps the case in district court rather than tying its cost to the $20,000 general civil jurisdictional ceiling. Checked August 1, 2026.

Alabama's unlawful detainer case is heard in the district court of the county where the rental property sits, and only there — Ala. Code § 6-6-330 puts it 'before the district court of the county in which the offense is committed,' and every county's district court is its own court, sharing a clerk with that county's circuit court. There is no municipal-court patchwork the way there is in Ohio; one district court per county, all 67 of them, is the real structure.

The single most important thing to know about Alabama's filing fee is that the number printed in the statute is not the number you will be asked to pay. Ala. Code § 12-19-71 sets a base district court fee of $198 for the bracket unlawful detainer falls into, but counties are allowed to add their own local court costs on top of it by local act, and every county we checked does. We saw $247 in Montgomery and Etowah on the low end and $302 in Madison on the high end, with Mobile, Jefferson, Lowndes, Baldwin, Wilcox and Shelby spread in between. Call the clerk's office for your county, or check its own posted chart, rather than relying on the bare statute.

Two counties' own 'Unlawful Detainers' instruction sheets, Mobile's and Montgomery's, use identical wording claiming 'the initial filing fee is $350.00' — a number that matches neither county's own official fee chart. We treat that as leftover boilerplate rather than a real figure, and we did not use it. If you see $350 quoted somewhere for one of those two counties, check the county's actual fee chart page before you pay it.

Sheriff service is billed separately from the filing fee everywhere we checked — we found no county in Alabama that folds it into the advertised total the way roughly a third of Georgia's counties do. What the Sheriff charges to serve the papers ranged from $20.00 to $50.00 per document among the counties we checked. Only one county, Madison, published a specific price for physically carrying out the writ of possession afterward: $20.00. We could not find that number anywhere else, so do not assume it is typical statewide.

Alabama's fee waiver has a feature we have not seen in Georgia or Florida: file the Affidavit of Substantial Hardship (form C-10-Civil) with your complaint and the fee is waived on the spot, not after a hearing. The court then has 90 days to challenge it in writing; if it stays silent that long, the waiver becomes permanent automatically. It is still all-or-nothing rather than graduated by income, the same as Georgia and Florida.

Every county fee chart we checked lists a $100.00 jury demand fee, matching Ala. Code § 12-19-71 exactly — but Alabama's district courts do not seat juries themselves. That fee is tied to moving a case to circuit court, either by removing it under § 12-12-37 or appealing a district court judgment under § 6-6-351. We could not confirm, on any page we could retrieve, whether that path is actually available to a party in an unlawful detainer case, which the statute puts exclusively in district court. Treat the jury option in an eviction case as an open question rather than a settled yes.

Common questions