About DivorceCostEstimator.com

Our Mission

Most people facing divorce have no idea what it will actually cost. Attorney websites give vague ranges. Legal aid sites focus on process, not numbers. We built DivorceCostEstimator.com to fill that gap with real, state-specific data that helps people understand the financial picture before they make any decisions.

Our goal is simple: give anyone in the United States a free, accurate starting point for understanding divorce costs in their state. The calculators are free to use and require no sign-up, and your estimate is the same whether or not you take our optional offer to connect with a local attorney. Just clear information when you need it most.

Our Data Sources

Where a figure on this site is read from a document, that document is a state court website, a state statute, a court rule, or a published guideline schedule, and the page carrying the figure names it. Each state's data record carries the citations behind that row and the date the filing fee was last checked, where it has been checked at all.

This paragraph used to name the National Conference of State Legislatures, the American Bar Association and US Census Bureau divorce statistics as sources for our data. They are not, and we would rather correct that than leave it standing. We have not taken a single published figure from any of the three. They are worth reading, and you will still find them linked at the bottom of each calculator as further reading, but nothing on this site is a number we got from them.

Where we have not confirmed a state-specific figure against its official source, the page says so and points you at that state's own courts, rather than showing a number we cannot stand behind. A gap you can see is more useful than a figure you cannot check.

That applies to a lot of the dataset, so here is the count rather than a summary of it. We have checked the filing fee for 18 of the 50 states against a source, most recently in August 2026. The other 32 carry a filing fee from our original build that nobody here has since re-checked, and each of those pages says so where the figure appears. Verification also happens one figure at a time rather than one state at a time, so a state with a date beside its filing fee can still have a child support figure we have not confirmed, and that is disclosed separately on the page it appears on.

The rest of the cost data is a different case and we would rather say it plainly than let a verification count cover for it. Attorney hourly rates, mediator session rates, QDRO preparation costs, the average totals for a contested and an uncontested case, and the typical number of months a case takes are our own estimates on all 50 states. They came into our data when the site was built and no survey, agency series or study stands behind any of them. Our own numbers say as much: attorney rates across the whole country take seven distinct values at the low end, every one a multiple of 25, which is what a set of estimates looks like rather than fifty separate readings. We think they are in the right neighbourhood, and we are not going to call them measured averages.

Calculator methodology and state law content last updated July 2026.

Important: What This Site Is Not

Contact

Questions about our data, methodology, or a correction to submit? Email us at info@divorcecostestimator.com.