How we verify court fees

Court fee data in the United States has a shape: 40 states and the District of Columbia publish consolidated statewide fee schedules, and 10 states set fees county by county. That means roughly 80 to 120 authoritative sources cover the large majority of the population. We load those sources one at a time, and every fee we publish points at the document it came from.

Every fee carries its source and date

Each fee line shows its issuing authority, links the source document, and carries the date we last verified it. The last-verified date is not decoration. It is the honest answer to the only question that matters about compiled fee data: how old is this figure. We never claim our data is always current. We claim it is dated, cited, and alerted.

The January sweep

Fee schedules move on a calendar. Texas counties may reset civil process fees every January 1 under Local Government Code §118.131, and Florida filing fees are set by state statute and shift only when the Legislature amends them. So every January we re-verify every source in the corpus, working the queue over several weeks. Each pass updates the source’s verification date, which is the same date shown on its pages.

Monitoring between sweeps

Between sweeps, an automated checker watches each source document for changes. When one moves, the change enters a review queue. A human reviews every detected change against the document before anything publishes. No fee change goes live without review, because a wrong figure published fast is worse than a right figure published tomorrow.

When sources conflict

Sometimes the statewide schedule and a county page disagree, or two county documents do. Our policy is to call the clerk’s office, record what they tell us, and log the call date as the verification event. We do the call so you do not have to. Where we cannot resolve a conflict, the page says so rather than guessing.

Corrections, in public

Every fee row carries a report link. When someone in the field tells us a figure is off, we verify against the issuing source within 2 business days and either correct it or confirm it. Confirmed corrections appear in the public change log marked as corrections. We would rather show you a miss than hide one: a fee record you cannot check is not worth paying for.

What we are not

ClerkFees is not affiliated with any court, clerk, or state judiciary, and it is not a law firm. The fee the clerk charges controls. We cite and date every figure so you can verify in one click.