What the Circuit Clerk (the same elected clerk also serves as the district court's civil clerk in every county) charges to file an eviction or a small claims case, what the sheriff charges to serve it, and how to ask the court to waive the fees.
Everything the clerk charges on an eviction or small claims case in Elmore County. The figures set by state statute are verified and apply here. A dash means we have not yet read this county’s own schedule — not that the fee is zero.
| Fee | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Eviction filing — possession + rent claim | — | |
| Eviction filing — possession only | — | |
| Appearance fee — eviction defendant | — | |
| Appearance fee — small claims defendant | — | |
| Jury demand — 12 jurors | $100 | Set by Ala. Code § 12-19-71 and printed identically on every county fee chart we checked. It funds moving a case out of district court, which does not hold jury trials itself, toward a circuit court jury — we could not confirm this route is actually open in an eviction case specifically. |
| Jury demand — 6 jurors | — | No county fee chart we checked distinguishes a jury by panel size. There is only the single $100.00 jury demand fee. |
| Jury demand — small claims | — | We found no evidence of a jury option on the small claims docket, and no separate fee for one on any county's small claims chart. |
| Mediation fee | — | |
| E-filing surcharge | — |
The filing fee is not the whole bill. Somebody has to serve the defendant, and in Alabama the sheriff sets that price county by county — it is the most variable number on this page. Sheriff service of the unlawful detainer papers ranged from $20.00 to $50.00 per document among the counties we checked, set by each county rather than by state law. Only Madison County published a separate price for executing the writ of possession itself, $20.00; we found no published figure for that step anywhere else.
Alabama courts will waive court fees, costs, and charges for people below certain income levels, under Ala. Code § 12-19-70 and Ala. Code § 12-19-70. There is one statewide form — you do not need a Elmore County version of it.
| The court waives | If your available income is |
|---|---|
| Full, on a 90-day clock | You file a verified statement that paying the docket fee would be a substantial hardship. The fee is waived immediately. The court then has 90 days to review it; if the judge makes a written finding within that window that you can actually afford the fee, you get 30 more days to pay. If the court does not rule within 90 days, the waiver is automatically final. |
Like Georgia and Florida, Alabama does not have graduated waiver bands tied to income — it is a single yes-or-no hardship finding. What is unusual about Alabama's version is the built-in deadline: silence from the court for 90 days locks the waiver in, rather than leaving it open-ended the way a poverty affidavit does in Georgia.
Fee waiver information verified August 1, 2026 against the Illinois General Assembly statute text and the Illinois Courts approved-forms library. We report what the statute and the form say. We cannot tell you whether you qualify — that is the court's decision.
Elmore County Circuit Court
Circuit Clerk (the same elected clerk also serves as the district court's civil clerk in every county)
No clerk website found. Contact the county courthouse directly.
AlaFile
AlaFile is Alabama's statewide e-filing system, but we could not find an official page that states outright whether a self-represented landlord or tenant may still file an eviction on paper at the clerk's counter in every county, the way they clearly can in Florida. Every county clerk page we checked has a walk-in counter and phone number, which points toward paper filing still being available, but treat this as our best reading rather than a confirmed rule. eFileIL →
We publish the court's and clerk's own contact information and link to their pages. We do not take your information, route you to anyone, or file anything on your behalf. For questions about court procedure — as opposed to what it costs — use the Illinois Courts self-help center.
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.
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.
Statutory backbone: 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. Statute text checked August 1, 2026.
Compiled and verified by David Scott. We re-check every source document monthly and re-read any county whose schedule has changed. If the clerk quotes you something different from what is on this page, tell us and we will fix it. Read the full methodology.