Arizona Court Filing Fees by County

How Arizona court filing fees are actually set

Arizona has a real statewide floor and real county-by-county variation on top of it, which makes it closer to Georgia than to Florida. The Legislature set the base forcible entry and detainer filing fee at $35.00 in A.R.S. § 22-281, and the Arizona Supreme Court raised it to $41.00 statewide effective December 28, 2024 under Administrative Order 2024-211, using the cost-of-living authority in § 22-281(F). That $41.00 is a floor, not a ceiling: individual justice courts are expressly allowed to add local fees on top of it, and they do. Of the counties we checked, Yavapai County charges exactly the $41.00 statewide baseline with nothing added, Apache County charges $52.00, Maricopa County (all 26 justice precincts, on one countywide schedule) charges $69.00, and Pima County charges $71.00. That is a spread of $41 to $71 for the same filing, a 73 percent difference between the cheapest and most expensive county we verified.

The statutory caps

This is the statewide baseline schedule set by the Arizona Supreme Court's Administrative Order 2024-211, effective December 28, 2024, under the CPI-adjustment authority in A.R.S. § 22-281(F). Unlike Florida's schedule, this is a floor rather than the final word: it is what a justice court must charge at minimum, and the individual county pages we checked show the real, higher, advertised total.

Source: A.R.S. § 22-281, Fees and deposits (justice courts). A.R.S. § 22-281, class C fee (forcible entry and detainer filings), currently printed in the statute at $35.00. § 22-281(F) lets the Arizona Supreme Court raise the class A through G fees printed in the statute by the change in the consumer price index since the last increase, without going back to the Legislature. The Court used that authority in Administrative Order 2024-211, effective December 28, 2024, which is why every justice court's actual advertised eviction filing fee is $41.00, not the $35.00 printed in the statute text itself. The $41.00 figure is confirmed on the Arizona Courts' own statewide fee page, not just the codified statute, so we are treating it as current. Anything a county charges above $41.00 is a local addition that neither the statute nor the administrative order explains line by line. Checked August 1, 2026.

One court type hears evictions statewide: the justice court. A.R.S. § 22-201 gives justices of the peace jurisdiction over forcible entry and detainer cases up to $10,000, concurrent with superior court, and A.R.S. § 22-402 confirms that municipal (city) courts handle ordinance and state-law violations, not civil eviction cases. That means every one of Arizona's 15 counties is a valid publishing unit, but a county is not one courthouse: it can be several justice precincts, each an elected justice of the peace with an elected constable attached. Maricopa County alone has 26 separate justice court precincts. What keeps this workable at the county level is that the big counties we checked publish one fee schedule for the whole county rather than one per precinct, so a county page can quote a single number even though many separate courthouses use it.

Arizona's eviction filing fee is not fixed by statute the way Florida's is, and it is not pure local court rule the way Georgia's is. There is a real statewide floor, $41.00, set by the Arizona Supreme Court under its cost-of-living authority, and every court is free to charge more. Of the counties we checked, Yavapai charges exactly $41.00, Apache charges $52.00, Maricopa charges $69.00, and Pima charges $71.00. If a page on this site shows a county other than Yavapai at $41.00 flat, treat that as unverified rather than assume the state minimum applies everywhere.

Service is not the sheriff's job here. Every justice precinct elects its own constable, and it is the constable, not the county sheriff, who serves the eviction summons and carries out the writ of restitution. A.R.S. § 11-445 prints a statewide constable fee table, but the writ-execution figure has an open-ended hourly charge past the first three hours, so we are not publishing a single flat constable dollar amount; budget at least $16.00 to serve the papers and at least $48.00 to execute a straightforward writ, more if it runs long.

We did not find any Arizona county that bundles constable service into the filing fee the way roughly a third of Georgia's counties fold sheriff service into their dispossessory fee. Every county page we checked, Maricopa and Pima in particular, lists the eviction complaint fee and the writ of restitution fee as two separate line items, so add them rather than assume one covers the other.

Arizona does allow a jury in an eviction case, unlike Georgia's magistrate court, which never empanels one. A.R.S. § 12-1176 gives either side the right to demand a six-person jury in justice court, and none of the fee schedules we checked charge anything extra for it. Small claims is the opposite: A.R.S. § 22-519 makes a small claims judgment final with no appeal, and the state's own self-service center confirms there is no jury trial and no right to appeal in that division at all, so a small claims case is genuinely a one-and-done forum in Arizona in a way an eviction case is not.

Watch for stale numbers on individual county pages. Arizona raised the small claims jurisdictional limit to $5,000, and the statewide self-service center confirms that figure, but Apache County's own justice court page still advertises the old $3,500 ceiling. Where a county's own page is out of date, we flag it rather than silently prefer the newer statewide number, because a filer reading that county's page will be told $3,500 regardless of what is technically current.

Common questions