North Carolina Court Filing Fees by County

How North Carolina court filing fees are actually set

North Carolina behaves like Florida, not Georgia: the filing fee is set once by the legislature and does not change from county to county. We checked the small-claims/summary-ejectment filing fee against Durham, Dare, and Wake counties' own clerk or sheriff pages, against the North Carolina Bar Association's statewide filing guide, against Legal Aid of North Carolina's statewide small-claims guide, and against the Administrative Office of the Courts' own statewide court-costs chart — all six list exactly $96.00, with no exceptions. The Sheriff's fee to serve the papers is likewise a single statewide number, $30.00 per person, confirmed in the same sources plus Wake County's own civil-process page. What is not fixed by statute is the cost to actually carry out a writ of possession and remove a tenant after judgment — the law only says the Sheriff may charge 'all necessary expenses' for that, so that figure is left to each Sheriff's office rather than published as one number.

The statutory caps

This is one statewide statutory table, not a county-by-county schedule. We show it here, the way we did for Florida, because North Carolina has a real one: every county clerk's fee information we checked reprints this same $96.00 rather than setting its own rate.

Source: N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-305(a); § 7A-311, Costs in civil actions (magistrate-court fees); sheriff's fees for service of civil process. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-305, as most recently amended; the current $96.00 magistrate-court total is reflected in the Administrative Office of the Courts' Court Costs and Fees Chart effective January 1, 2025. The $96.00 a filer pays is three add-ons stacked by statute, not one line item: an $80.00 General Court of Justice support fee, a $12.00 facilities fee, and a $4.00 telecommunications and data-connectivity fee. $80 + $12 + $4 = $96, and that is the figure every clerk's office we checked charges for a small-claims complaint, including summary ejectment, filed before a magistrate. Unlike Georgia's $15 indigent-defense add-on or Ohio's $26 legal-aid fee, North Carolina does not layer a separate statewide surcharge on top of this total — it is already baked in. Checked July 31, 2026.

The single most important thing to know about North Carolina is that it is structurally simple, the way Florida is: North Carolina's trial courts are a single state-funded system rather than county or municipal courts, every county has its own small claims court staffed by a magistrate under the Clerk of Superior Court's office, and a summary ejectment always goes to that court. That is a real contrast with a state like Ohio, where the court that hears an eviction can be a separate municipal court serving only part of a county. In North Carolina, the county is the right unit to publish this on.

The filing fee does not vary by county. We checked Durham, Dare and Wake counties' own pages, the state's official court-costs chart, the North Carolina Bar Association's statewide filing guide, and Legal Aid of North Carolina's statewide guide, and every one lists the same $96.00 for a small-claims complaint, including summary ejectment. That figure is three statutory add-ons — an $80.00 General Court of Justice support fee, a $12.00 facilities fee, and a $4.00 telecommunications fee — stacked into one number, not a locally set rate the way Georgia's magistrate courts set their own.

Service of the summons is a flat $30.00 per person everywhere, billed by the Sheriff's civil-process division and always separate from the $96.00 filing fee paid to the clerk. What is not flat, and not published as a single number anywhere we looked, is the cost of actually carrying out a writ of possession after judgment — the law only entitles the Sheriff to charge 'all necessary expenses' for that step, so a filer who wants that figure has to call the Sheriff's office in the county where the property sits.

There is no jury at the small-claims stage. A magistrate decides these cases alone, and the North Carolina Judicial Branch says so in plain language on its own small-claims page. A jury only comes into the picture if a party appeals the magistrate's decision to District Court for a full new trial, and even then there is no separate fee just for demanding the jury — you only have to ask for it before the appeal deadline passes or you lose the right.

The fee waiver is automatic for anyone already receiving SNAP, TANF or SSI, or represented by Legal Aid of North Carolina, which is a more concrete standard than Georgia's bare poverty affidavit or Florida's income-percentage test. Everyone else fills out the same statewide form, AOC-G-106, and the clerk decides based on income and expenses. Either way it is all-or-nothing — full waiver or full payment, no partial reduction.

Common questions