A wrong court fee is worse than no page at all. Someone budgets from it, shows up at the courthouse with the wrong amount, and gets turned away. So the rules below are not marketing — they are the operating constraints of the site, and you should hold us to them.
Every fee amount is read off a document published by the office that charges it: the Circuit Clerk's fee schedule, the county ordinance that sets the amounts, or the Sheriff's civil process fee schedule. That document is linked on the page. We do not take figures from other websites, law firm blog posts, aggregators, or AI-generated summaries — including our own. If we have not read it in the source, it does not go on the page.
When a county does not publish a figure, the page shows a dash and says "not published." It never shows $0, never shows a neighboring county's number, and never shows a state average presented as a local fee. This is the rule that costs us the most content and matters the most. Roughly one Illinois county in six publishes nothing usable, and another one in six publishes something too old to trust. Those pages exist and say so.
Two dates, actually, and they mean different things. "Checked" is when we last read the source document. "Source dated" is the effective date printed on that document by the county. A page checked yesterday against a schedule the county last revised in 2019 is not the same as a page checked yesterday against a schedule revised last month, and we show you both so you can tell the difference. Where a county prints no effective date at all — which happens more than you would like — we say that too.
Those dates are generated from the data, not typed into the page. There is no way for a stale date to sit on a page whose data has moved on, because the date and the figure come from the same record.
Every county page carries one of four states:
| Status | What it means | Counties |
|---|---|---|
| Verified | A clean, itemized fee schedule with a printed effective date. Every figure on the page was read off it. | 13 |
| Partial | The county publishes some fees but not all. Missing lines are marked missing. | 6 |
| Stale source | The only document the county publishes is old enough that the amounts may no longer be right. Shown with a warning, or suppressed entirely if it predates the governing statute. | 4 |
| Not published | No readable fee document exists. We publish the page with statewide figures and tell you to call the clerk. | 5 |
If the courthouse quotes you a different number from the one on this page, they are correct and we are wrong. Fee schedules change by county ordinance and administrative order, sometimes without any public notice and sometimes without the county updating its own website. Tell us and we will fix it, ideally with a link to what you were shown.
Court fees do not change randomly. In Illinois they cluster: October 1 and January 1 for county fiscal years, July 1 for statutory changes. Of the counties we have verified, we found revision dates clustered in October 2025 and again across April to July 2026 — two of them revised within three weeks of when we read them.
That is why we check monthly rather than on the calendar you might expect. Fetching and fingerprinting a few hundred documents is cheap; re-reading them is not. So every month the pipeline fetches each source, compares a fingerprint against the stored one, and sorts the results into two piles. Unchanged documents get their "checked" date rolled forward automatically — we did check them, we checked that they had not moved. Changed documents keep their old date and get flagged until a person re-reads them.
We do not publish a promised next-check date. We used to, and then thought about what it looks like in February on a page that says "next check January 15." A specific future date is a promise that visibly expires, and an expired promise reads as an abandoned site — which is worse than simply telling you when the page was last checked. Instead each page states the cadence, and if that cadence ever actually slips, the page flips itself to an overdue warning after 120 days.
When a fee does change, the county page says what it was and what it is now. That is the most useful thing we can tell a returning visitor.
Publishing this list is part of the method. If it is ever empty, be suspicious.
Compiled and verified by David Scott, who compiles court filing fees directly from Circuit Clerk and Sheriff fee schedules, records the source document and the date each figure was checked, and re-verifies every county on a fixed schedule.