Tennessee Court Filing Fees by County

How Tennessee court filing fees are actually set

Tennessee behaves like Georgia, not Florida: the detainer warrant filing fee is not one number statewide, even though a real statute sets a statewide base. Tenn. Code Ann. § 8-21-401 fixes the general sessions civil filing fee at $42.00 and a separate state litigation tax statute, § 67-4-602, adds $17.75 or $23.75 plus $1.00 depending on the court's jurisdiction, but a third statute, § 67-4-601, then lets each county's legislative body add its own local litigation tax on top, in amounts that differ county by county, mostly written into the code as population brackets rather than county names. The result, confirmed on four counties' own clerk fee schedules, is a real spread: Davidson County (Nashville) charges $145.75 for a Detainer Warrant, Montgomery County (Clarksville) $148.50, Anderson County $132.75 if you arrange your own process server or $184.75 if the Sheriff serves it, and Hamilton County (Chattanooga) $271.25 with sheriff service built in. We could not reach Shelby County's (Memphis) own site to confirm its figure, and several other counties we tried either block automated access to their fee pages or post the schedule as an unreadable scanned PDF, so this range should be read as a floor and not a ceiling.

Tennessee hears every eviction in the General Sessions Court of the county where the property sits, and there is one General Sessions Court per county, all 95 of them, under Tenn. Code Ann. § 29-18-107. That is a real structural difference from Ohio, where the unit of variation is a patchwork of separate municipal and county courts. The two counties most likely to look different, Davidson (Nashville) and Shelby (Memphis), are administratively bigger, not jurisdictionally different: Davidson's Metropolitan General Sessions Court has eleven elected judges across numbered divisions instead of one judge, and Shelby is one of the few counties in the state that elects its own General Sessions Court Clerk as a separate office rather than routing civil filings through the Circuit Court Clerk. Either way, it is still the one General Sessions Court of that county that hears the case, the same as everywhere else in Tennessee.

The filing fee is not uniform statewide, and the gap is real money, not rounding. Of the four counties whose own clerk pages we could read, Davidson charges $145.75 for a Detainer Warrant, Montgomery $148.50, Anderson $132.75 to $184.75 depending on who serves it, and Hamilton $271.25. A $42.00 statutory base filing fee (Tenn. Code Ann. § 8-21-401) is the same everywhere, but state and local litigation taxes stack on top of it in amounts that differ by county, so the county you file in changes your total by well over $100 in the four counties we could confirm.

Some counties fold sheriff service of the first defendant into the advertised filing fee and some do not, the same trap this site flagged in Georgia. Anderson County prices it both ways on the same page: $132.75 if you arrange your own process server, $184.75 if the Sheriff serves it in-county, a difference of exactly $52.00. Davidson and Hamilton both publish a single "Detainer Warrant" total with no separate unbundled figure, which reads as if service is already included. Check whether the number you are looking at is filing-only or filing-plus-service before you compare it to another county's number.

The one figure that held steady across every county we checked was the Sheriff's per-defendant service charge: $52.00 in Anderson, Montgomery, Davidson, and Hamilton alike, and the writ of possession (the step that actually removes a tenant after judgment) came out to $77.00 in the three counties that itemized it, built from a $25.00 clerk fee plus that same $52.00 sheriff fee. That consistency, next to a filing fee that swings by more than $100 between counties, suggests the service and enforcement side of an eviction is close to statutory-uniform in Tennessee even though the filing side is not.

There is no jury trial, and so no jury fee to plan for, in Tennessee general sessions court itself. Hamilton County's own court page states outright that there are no jury trials in Sessions Court. A defendant who wants a jury has to appeal to circuit court within 10 days for a trial de novo under Tenn. Code Ann. § 27-5-108, which comes with its own appeal bond and, in the counties we checked, a separate and higher filing fee ($300.00 in Anderson, $314.50 in Hamilton).

Documentation access, not just documentation content, was a real obstacle for this state. Several county government sites (Shelby, Knox, Rutherford, Robertson, Blount, Bradley, Sevier, Williamson, Sullivan, and Wilson among them) either blocked automated access to their own pages or hosted their fee schedule as a scanned PDF with no extractable text. We are naming Shelby specifically because it is the state's largest county by population and we could not confirm its detainer warrant fee from its own site at all; treat the figures on this record as a confirmed floor from four counties, not a full statewide picture, and call the Shelby County Clerk's office directly if that county's exact number matters to you.

One piece of the Tennessee bill has two possible values and we could not tell which applies to an eviction. The state litigation tax is $17.75 when a general sessions court is exercising its own jurisdiction and $24.75 when it is exercising state court jurisdiction, and no source we found says which a detainer warrant counts as. It is a seven dollar question inside a fee that runs well over a hundred, so it will not change your plans — but it is one reason the totals below do not reconcile exactly to the statutes.

Common questions