Florida Court Filing Fees by County

How Florida court filing fees are actually set

Unlike Georgia, Florida's eviction and small claims filing fees do not vary by county. Fla. Stat. § 34.041 sets a single statewide fee for every case type, and the total you pay is the same whether you file in Miami-Dade or a one-clerk rural courthouse in the Panhandle. We checked the eviction (removal of tenant) filing fee in eleven counties spanning the largest and smallest — Miami-Dade, Broward, Duval, Orange, Hillsborough, Charlotte, Lee, Walton, Okaloosa, Washington and Hernando — and every one of them charges exactly $185.00. The small claims filing fee is likewise fixed statewide, but tiered by how much money is at stake: $55 for claims under $100, $80 for $100–$500, $175 for $500–$2,500, and $300 for $2,500 up to the $8,000 small claims ceiling. Above that, and up to $15,000, the county court civil fee is $295 plus $5 (or $300, if it is filed on the small claims track by agreement); above $15,000 it is $395 plus $5. What does change from case to case, on top of these fixed filing fees, is the sheriff's charge to serve the summons and the writ of possession, which is billed separately and by the tenant, not the county.

The statutory caps

This is one statewide statutory table, not a county-by-county schedule. We are showing it here, unlike Georgia's empty schedule, precisely because Florida has a real one: every county clerk's fee page we checked reprints these same numbers rather than setting its own.

Source: Fla. Stat. § 34.041, Filing fees (county courts). Fla. Stat. § 34.041, as most recently amended; the $180 base tenant-removal figure and the current tiered small-claims fees trace to ch. 2009-204, Laws of Florida (SB 1728), effective June 1, 2009. The clerk's advertised total is not the bare number printed in § 34.041. § 34.041(1)(a)8 sets the base tenant-removal fee at $180, but § 34.041(1)(b) adds a mandatory $4 per-case surcharge (split between the Court Education Trust Fund and an administrative trust fund), and Fla. Stat. § 44.108(1) adds a separate $1 mediation-and-arbitration trust fund fee that applies to "all proceedings in the circuit or county courts." $180 + $4 + $1 = $185, which is the exact figure every county clerk's page we checked publishes. The same $4 and $1 add-ons explain why the small-claims tiers print as $55/$80/$175/$300 rather than the $50/$75/$170/$295 base amounts named in the statute's claim-value table. Checked July 31, 2026.

The single most important thing to know about Florida is that, structurally, it is simple: every eviction is filed in the County Court of the county where the rental property sits, there is exactly one County Court per county, and the filing fee is set by state statute rather than by the county. That is a real contrast with Georgia, where the same kind of case can cost anywhere from $47 to $120 in filing fees alone depending on which of 159 counties you are in. In Florida the fee is $185.00 everywhere, in every county we checked from Miami-Dade to rural Panhandle counties like Washington and Walton.

Miami-Dade is the one place we found where the county routes an eviction to one of several courthouses depending on the zip code of the rental property, using an online locator tool. That changes which building and which judge you appear before, not which court hears the case or what it costs — it is still the Miami-Dade County Court and still the same $185 fee. We flag it because a filer who has only used the locator might reasonably wonder if Miami-Dade has more than one eviction court; it does not.

Service is never folded into the filing fee in Florida the way it sometimes is in Georgia. In every county we checked, the $185 filing fee, the $17 the clerk charges to issue and prepare the summons, the $40 the Sheriff charges to serve it, and the $90 the Sheriff charges to execute the writ of possession after judgment are four separate charges, billed by two different offices, and none of them absorbs another. Budget for all four if the case goes all the way to a lockout.

Florida does allow a jury trial in an eviction or small claims case if a party demands one in time, which is the opposite of Georgia, where magistrate court never empanels a jury. But Florida charges nothing extra to demand one — the small claims rules used to require a cost deposit and the rule committee removed it in 1984 specifically so that the price of a case would not depend on whether either side wanted a jury.

We verified the $185 eviction fee and the sheriff's $40/$90 service and writ figures against eleven counties' own clerk and sheriff pages rather than a law firm's cost estimate, because a few of the blog-style eviction-cost guides we came across while searching quoted stale or rounded numbers. Every primary source we checked agreed to the penny, which is part of why we are confident enough to call Florida's filing fee non-varying rather than just "probably uniform."

Common questions