Louisiana Court Filing Fees by County

How Louisiana court filing fees are actually set

Louisiana does not have one court per parish for evictions, so "the parish's eviction filing fee" is already a simplification before you get to a dollar amount. Code of Civil Procedure Article 4832 recognizes three kinds of trial courts of limited jurisdiction — parish courts, city courts, and justice of the peace courts — sitting alongside the district court, and which one hears a given eviction turns on where in the parish the rental sits and how much rent is at stake, not simply which of the 64 parishes you are in. Some parishes, like East Baton Rouge (three city courts) or Jefferson (two parish courts, eight justice-of-the-peace wards), have several courts that could hear the same case. Others, like Cameron or Tensas, have no city or parish court at all, only justice-of-the-peace wards and the district court. Layered on top of that, every court we could check prices its own eviction (called a rule for possession) differently: $71.00 in court costs at the City Court of East St. Tammany in Slidell, plus a separate $50.00 marshal's fee; $150.00 at Alexandria City Court; $164.00 at Baton Rouge City Court; $250.00 to $350.00 at Lake Charles City Court depending on whether a rent claim is added; and $375.00 plus a court-set bond at Jefferson Parish's 1st and 2nd Parish Courts. Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2590 prints one statewide $100.00 figure for justice-of-the-peace courts, but we could not check it against a live JP court page, so we are not calling it confirmed. District court costs are itemized rather than a single fee at all (R.S. 13:841), and simply adding the pieces together understates what clerks actually charge — the same trap that caught New Jersey's and Wisconsin's printed statutes. In short: the filing fee varies, and it varies for two independent reasons at once — which court has the case, and what that particular court charges.

The statutory caps

This is not one schedule. It is every eviction fee we could personally read on a court's own current page, from six independently priced courts spread across five parishes, none of which shares a number with any other. There is no statewide table and no per-parish table — each city court, parish court, and justice of the peace court sets or is assigned its own figure.

Source: La. C.C.P. arts. 4701–4735 (eviction); arts. 4831–4844, 4911–4913 (court jurisdiction); La. R.S. 13:841, 13:2590 (costs), Eviction of Tenants and Occupants; Trial Courts of Limited Jurisdiction; clerk and justice-of-the-peace cost statutes. Book VIII (Trial Courts of Limited Jurisdiction) was recodified by Acts 1979, No. 46, effective January 1, 1980; the dollar ceilings in Articles 4842–4844 and 4911–4912 and the cost schedule in R.S. 13:2590 have each been amended repeatedly since, most recently in the 2020s.. Article 4844 sets the rent ceiling that lets a parish or city court hear an eviction — $150 a day, $500 a week, $3,000 a month, or $36,000 a year in most courts — but more than a dozen individual city courts carry their own, separately legislated ceiling written into Article 4843 (several small courts and Bossier City at $15,000; Lafayette at $20,000; nine courts including some in New Orleans at $25,000; ten more at $30,000; nine more at $35,000; seven more at $50,000). Justice of the peace courts are the exception that swallows the rule: Article 4912 gives them unlimited jurisdiction over a residential eviction no matter the rent, so a landlord in a parish with no city or parish court, or whose rent exceeds the local ceiling, still has a court of limited jurisdiction available rather than being forced into district court. Checked August 1, 2026.

The single most important thing to know about a Louisiana eviction is that the parish is not always where the buck stops. Code of Civil Procedure Article 4832 defines three kinds of trial courts of limited jurisdiction — parish courts, city courts, and justice of the peace courts — and a district court sits over all of them. Which one hears your case depends on where in the parish the rental sits and how much rent is at stake, not simply which parish you are in. Orleans Parish alone runs its eviction cases through two separate city courts — First City Court, downtown at 421 Loyola Avenue, and Second City Court, across the river in Algiers at 225 Morgan Street — on top of Orleans Parish Civil District Court. East Baton Rouge Parish has three city courts (Baton Rouge, Baker, and Zachary) plus six justice-of-the-peace wards. Jefferson Parish has two parish courts and eight justice-of-the-peace courts. In a rural parish like Cameron or Tensas there is no city or parish court at all, and the case goes to a justice-of-the-peace ward or to the district court. We say this plainly because a single 'this parish's eviction filing fee' figure is a simplification of a genuinely forked system, not a fact we chose not to look up.

Louisiana runs on civil law, not the common law used by every other state on this site, and the vocabulary is different throughout. The Code's own heading for this area of law is 'Eviction of Tenants and Occupants,' so we use eviction, the word the statute uses. But the document that starts the case is not a complaint or a petition — it is a rule to show cause, commonly called a rule for possession, and it is tried as a summary proceeding. The officer who serves it and later removes a tenant is not necessarily a sheriff: Article 4733 names a sheriff, constable, or marshal interchangeably, and which one shows up depends on the court — the parish Sheriff in district court, a justice of the peace's own elected constable in a JP court, and often a separately elected City Marshal in a city court.

Where we could read a fee on a court's own current page, no two courts charged the same amount. Alexandria City Court charges $150.00 for one tenant; Baton Rouge City Court charges $164.00; Lake Charles City Court charges $250.00 for possession alone and $350.00 if a rent claim is added; Jefferson Parish's 1st and 2nd Parish Courts charge $375.00 plus a bond the court sets case by case; and the City Court of East St. Tammany in Slidell charges $71.00 in court costs plus a separate $50.00 marshal's fee to serve one tenant, for $121.00 combined. That last one is not a Georgia-style bundling of service into one advertised number — East St. Tammany simply shows both charges on the same page — but it is exactly the kind of arithmetic a reader could get wrong by adding a filing fee from one court to a service fee looked up somewhere else.

Louisiana Revised Statutes 13:2590 prints a single, statewide fee schedule for justice-of-the-peace courts — $100.00 to file an eviction, plus $20.00 per additional defendant — and because a justice of the peace has unlimited jurisdiction over a residential eviction no matter how much rent is owed, that is the court most likely to see a rural case. We are not publishing that $100.00 figure as confirmed, though. Justice of the peace courts are small, elected, often part-time offices that rarely have a website at all, and after finding New Jersey's and Wisconsin's printed statutes off by two to seven times what their courts actually charge, we are not willing to repeat a number we could not check against a live page. Treat $100.00 as what the law says, not as a promise of what you will pay.

We looked for a district court eviction figure too and could not responsibly produce one. Louisiana's district court cost statute, R.S. 13:841, is priced item by item rather than as one filing fee, and adding the pieces together for a bare one-page case comes to roughly $46 — a number we are not printing, because Caddo Parish's own clerk charges $300.00 for an ordinary civil suit with one service, and Jefferson Parish's clerk is separately authorized to add another 25% on top of the statute. A reconstructed statutory total is not a substitute for what a clerk actually collects, and we would rather send you to ask than publish a guess.

There is no jury and no jury fee anywhere in a Louisiana eviction case, in any of the four kinds of court that can hear one. Article 1732 excludes both summary proceedings — which is what an eviction rule legally is — and parish or city court suits generally from the right to a jury trial, and a justice of the peace court has no jury to seat in the first place.

A fee waiver is available in every one of these courts under the same statewide statute, and it is broader than just the filing fee: once granted, it also covers a sheriff's, clerk's, and other officers' service and issuance charges for the life of the case. It is all-or-nothing, like Georgia, Florida, New Jersey and Wisconsin, but the law presumes you qualify if your income is at or below 125% of the federal poverty line or you receive public assistance, which shifts the burden onto anyone who wants to argue otherwise.

Common questions