Virginia Court Filing Fees by County

How Virginia court filing fees are actually set

Virginia is not Georgia and it is not quite Florida either. The base civil filing fee for an unlawful detainer, warrant in debt, or small claims case is set by state statute (Va. Code § 16.1-69.48:2) at a flat $36, and every General District Court uses the same statewide calculator to price a filing. But the total a court actually charges is higher than $36 everywhere, and it is not identical everywhere. We ran the state's own official fee calculator, https://www.vacourts.gov/gdfees_calc_app, for an unlawful detainer with a claim between $500.01 and $50,000 and no sheriff service, in eight courts spanning large and small, urban and rural, counties and independent cities: Lee County ($46.00), Fairfax County ($52.00), Richmond City ($52.00), Virginia Beach ($52.00), Buchanan County ($52.00), Norfolk ($53.00), Wise County ($53.00), and Alexandria ($55.00). The filing fee varies by locality, but only within a narrow band, roughly $46 to $55, nothing like the $47-to-$120 spread we found in Georgia. Sheriff service, when you ask the court to arrange it, adds a further $12.00 per defendant on top of any of those totals, and that figure is fixed by statute and identical everywhere.

Every one of Virginia's 95 counties and 39 independent cities has its own General District Court, and it is the same court that hears both unlawful detainer and small claims cases, so this site can and does publish a page for each of the 134 units. That is a real structural difference from Ohio, where the county is not always the right unit because some municipal courts cover only part of a county or spill across county lines.

An independent city in Virginia is not a neighborhood or a district inside its surrounding county, it is its own separate local government with its own courthouse, its own General District Court, and its own case records, entirely outside the county that surrounds it. Alexandria is not part of Fairfax County's court system, and Richmond City is not part of Henrico or Chesterfield County's. Filing an unlawful detainer with the wrong one, because the two share a name or sit next to each other on a map, means showing up at a courthouse that has never heard of your case and starting over. Always check the property's address against the specific city or county line, not just the metro area it sits in.

The filing fee does vary from court to court, but only modestly. Checking eight courts of different sizes with the state's own online calculator, we found a range of $46.00 to $55.00 to file an unlawful detainer with no sheriff service, a $9.00 spread. That is real money, but it is nowhere near the scale of Georgia's county-to-county gap, and it means a Virginia filer should expect a number in that general range almost anywhere in the state, then check the calculator for the exact figure at the courthouse where the property sits.

Sheriff service is never folded into the filing fee in Virginia, unlike roughly a third of Georgia's counties. Turning sheriff service on and off in the state's own calculator changed the Fairfax County total by exactly $12.00 per defendant, matching the statutory service fee precisely, in every court we tested. Budget for the filing fee and the $12.00 service fee as two separate charges, and if the case goes all the way to a lockout, a further $25.00 for the sheriff to execute the writ of possession.

There are no jury trials in Virginia General District Court, for evictions or anything else, which is the same structural fact as Georgia's magistrate court and the opposite of Florida's county court. If either side wants a jury, the only path is to appeal the case to Circuit Court, a different court with a different, higher fee schedule, and a jury may then be demanded if the amount in controversy is more than $50.

Virginia's own General District Court civil filing fee calculator is the best documentation baseline we have found in any state so far: it is built and maintained by the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia, it is court-specific, and it lets a filer see the exact total before walking into the clerk's office. We used it directly rather than adding up the bare statutes ourselves, because on its own the statute only gets to about $39.00 and the calculator returns $46.00 to $55.00; we could not find the remaining statute that accounts for the difference, and we would rather tell you that plainly than publish a number the calculator does not confirm.

Common questions