New Jersey Court Filing Fees by County

How New Jersey court filing fees are actually set

New Jersey does not set eviction or small claims filing fees county by county the way Georgia does. Every Special Civil Part office sits inside that county's Superior Court courthouse — there is one in each of the state's 21 counties — but all of them run on the same statewide fee statute, so there is no local court rule for a county to set its own rate with, and we found no evidence anywhere that one does. That puts New Jersey's shape closer to Florida's than to Georgia's: the number is the same wherever you file. What we could confirm directly from the Judiciary's own site: filing a Small Claims Section case (up to $5,000) costs $35.00 for one defendant, plus $5.00 for each additional defendant, and the Special Civil Part's general track runs up to $20,000. What we could not confirm is the current fee to file an eviction (tenancy) complaint. The 2021-amended fee statute prints $25.00 for that, but the same statute prints $15.00 for the small claims filing we just confirmed now costs $35.00 on the court's own page — more than double the printed number — so we do not trust the $25.00 figure enough to publish it as current. See the open question below for the full reasoning.

The statutory caps

This is one statewide statutory table, the same in every county, not a county-by-county schedule the way Georgia's is. We split it into two groups above on purpose: the top group is what the Judiciary's own small claims page currently charges, word for word; the bottom group is only what the fee statute itself prints, which we could not check against a live court page and now have specific reason to distrust.

Source: N.J.S.A. 22A:2-37.1; N.J.S.A. 22A:2-37.2, Special Civil Part of Superior Court, Law Division fees; fees to officers designated by the Assignment Judge to serve process. N.J.S.A. 22A:2-37.1, last amended by P.L.2021, c.188, s.8; N.J.S.A. 22A:2-37.2, last amended by P.L.2021, c.188, s.9. As printed, 22A:2-37.1 charges $15.00 to file a one-defendant small claim, $25.00 to file a one-defendant tenancy (eviction) complaint, $32.00 for a one-defendant civil complaint at or under the small claims limit, $50.00 for one over it, $15.00 to file an appearance or answer in anything except small claims, $50.00 to demand a six-person jury, $15.00 to have a warrant for possession issued, and $5.00 to have a writ of execution issued, with $2.00 more per additional defendant in most of those categories. 22A:2-37.2 sets what the court pays the serving officer: as little as $3.00 to serve one defendant, $2.00 for each additional one, and $10.00 to serve a warrant for possession in a tenancy case. Checked August 1, 2026.

Every eviction in New Jersey is filed in the Special Civil Part of the Superior Court, Law Division, and there is one Special Civil Part inside the county courthouse in each of the state's 21 counties. That is a real, confirmed contrast with a state like Ohio, where the unit that varies is a municipal or district court rather than the county itself. In New Jersey the county is the right unit to publish at.

The filing fee itself does not vary by county the way Georgia's does. New Jersey's Special Civil Part runs on one statewide fee statute and one statewide case-management system, and we found no mechanism anywhere for a county to set its own rate. Where we could check a fee directly against the Judiciary's own current page — the Small Claims Section filing fee — the number was $35.00 for one defendant, well above the $15.00 the fee statute itself prints. That gap is the most important thing on this page: it means the printed statute is not a safe stand-in for what a filer actually pays, and it is why we have withheld the eviction (tenancy) complaint filing fee rather than publish the statute's $25.00 figure as current.

Service is not handled by a Sheriff, a Marshal or a Constable the way it sometimes is in Georgia. New Jersey uses a single title, Special Civil Part Officer, statewide, and most Special Civil Part summonses go out by certified and regular mail rather than by hand. We confirmed a flat $7.00 mail-service charge for a small claims case directly on the Judiciary's site, but we could not confirm that the same $7.00 applies to serving an eviction complaint, and we could not find a current, confirmed cost for having an officer carry out a warrant of removal (the eviction lockout).

New Jersey does offer a jury in the Special Civil Part, but only a six-person jury — there is no twelve-person option here, unlike the regular Law Division. The fee statute prices the six-person jury demand at $50.00, but given how far off this same statute's other printed numbers turned out to be, we are not confident that figure is still what is charged, and we have not published it as a live number for that reason.

A fee waiver is available and, like Georgia and Florida, it is all-or-nothing rather than graduated. The test we found on the Judiciary's own page is a household income at or below 150% of the federal poverty level and no more than $2,500 in liquid assets; meeting both means no filing fee at all, and falling short on either one means paying in full.

Documentation baseline for this record is uneven by design, not by accident. A handful of figures — the small claims filing fee, the writ of execution fee, the appeal fees, the small claims and Special Civil Part jurisdictional ceilings, and the fee-waiver income test — came straight off the Judiciary's own current pages and carry high confidence. The tenancy complaint filing fee, the jury demand fee and a few others exist only in the codified fee statute, and because we caught that same statute under-quoting a fee we could independently check by more than double, we are treating those figures as unconfirmed rather than current, and saying so rather than guessing.

Common questions