Wisconsin Court Filing Fees by County

How Wisconsin court filing fees are actually set

Wisconsin behaves like Florida far more than Georgia: the small claims and eviction filing fee is set by state law, not by the county, and the circuit court system's own statewide fee schedule (updated July 13, 2026) shows the identical total in every county we checked — Milwaukee, Dane, Waukesha, Brown and others — with a single, named exception. The total is $94.50, made up of a $22.00 base filing fee under Wis. Stat. 814.62(3)(a), a $51.00 Court Support Services charge, and a $21.50 Justice Information surcharge. In Milwaukee County only, an additional $3.50 special prosecution clerks surcharge under Wis. Stat. 814.86(1m) brings the total to $98.00. Every other county charges $94.50. This is a real difference from Georgia, where the filing fee varies unpredictably county to county, and from Ohio, where the unit of variation is not even the county. Here the variation is a single, fully-documented $3.50 add-on tied to one specific county by name.

The statutory caps

This is one statewide schedule published by the Wisconsin court system, the same way Florida has one and unlike Georgia's county-by-county local rules. Wisconsin's circuit courts are part of a single state court system, and the fee schedule we relied on is issued for use by every clerk of circuit court in all 72 counties, not set locally county by county.

Source: Wis. Stat. 814.62(3)(a); 799.01, Fees in small claims actions; exclusive use of small claims procedure. Wis. Stat. 814.62(3)(a) sets the $22.00 base fee; the Court Support Services and Justice Information add-ons that bring the real total to $94.50 come from separate surcharge statutes referenced on the circuit court's own fee schedule. The $22.00 printed in 814.62(3)(a) is not what anyone actually pays. The circuit court system's own fee schedule shows the $22.00 base fee plus a $51.00 Court Support Services (CSS) charge and a $21.50 Justice Information (JINFO) surcharge, for a real total of $94.50 in 71 of the 72 counties, and $98.00 in Milwaukee County because of an added $3.50 special prosecution clerks surcharge under Wis. Stat. 814.86(1m). We are publishing $94.50 / $98.00 because that is the figure the state court system itself says is collected, not the bare $22.00 the statute alone would suggest. Checked July 31, 2026.

Every Wisconsin eviction is filed in the Circuit Court of the county where the rental property sits, and every one of the 72 counties has its own circuit court branch and its own clerk of circuit court who takes the filing and collects the fee. That is different from the shared-judge arrangement in three pairs of counties — Buffalo and Pepin, Florence and Forest, and Menominee and Shawano — where the same judge presides over both counties. Sharing a judge does not change which county's clerk you file with or what you pay; it is a staffing arrangement, not a merged court. Wisconsin does not have Ohio's problem of city and county courts that do not line up with county borders.

The single most important thing to know about Wisconsin's fee is that the number printed in the filing-fee statute itself, $22.00, is not what you pay. The circuit court system's own fee schedule adds a $51.00 Court Support Services charge and a $21.50 Justice Information surcharge on top of that base fee, for a real total of $94.50 almost everywhere in the state. If you only read the statute you would show up $72.50 short.

Milwaukee County is the one place in Wisconsin where the eviction and small claims filing fee is not $94.50. An extra $3.50 special prosecution clerks surcharge brings it to $98.00 there, and nowhere else.

Wisconsin does hold jury trials in eviction and small claims cases, unlike Georgia's magistrate court, which never does. Either side can demand one, but it costs $89.00 to do it — a $53.00 jury demand fee plus a $36.00 fee for the 6 jurors used in these cases — and in an eviction, the demand has to be filed by the time issue is joined, which is earlier than the 20-day window allowed in other small claims cases.

We could not pin down what a Wisconsin sheriff actually charges to serve eviction papers or carry out a writ of restitution. The statute's own numbers, $12.00 for service and $8.00 plus hourly deputy time for an eviction, look like a floor rather than a real price: the one county fee schedule we found in full, Brown County's, charges a flat $95.00 for the first attempt at service alone. We are not guessing at a statewide number from a single county's page, so this site tells you to check with the sheriff's civil process division in the county where the property sits rather than showing a dollar figure we have not confirmed.

Common questions