title: "Court fees in Delhi: how the calculation actually works" description: "How court fees in Delhi are calculated under the Court Fees Act, ad valorem versus fixed fee, rough figures for common suits, DRT application fees, and where advocates get the sums wrong." datePublished: "2026-07-08T00:00:00+05:30" dateModified: "2026-07-08T00:00:00+05:30" author: "NyayX Team" ogImageTitle: "Court fees in Delhi: how they are calculated"
Every clerk in Delhi has a story about a plaint bounced back from the registry over the court fee. It is usually not because nobody knew the law. It is because the valuation was worked out on a guess, or copied from an old file without checking whether the schedule had moved since. If you search for court fees in Delhi or a court fee calculator Delhi, you are probably trying to avoid exactly that. Here is how the calculation actually works, with rough figures, before you go anywhere near the registry counter.
The law behind the number
Court fees payable in Delhi trace back to the Court Fees Act, 1870, as adapted and amended for application in Delhi over the years. The Act sets out a schedule (Schedule I and Schedule II, broadly) that splits every kind of suit or application into one of two buckets: ad valorem fee, which scales with the value of what is claimed, or fixed fee, a flat amount regardless of the claim's size. The schedule gets revised periodically, most notably through Delhi specific amendments, so a rate you used two years ago is not something to assume still holds. This is the single biggest reason to run any suit valuation through a current civil court fees calculator rather than trusting memory or an old chambers note.
Ad valorem fee: the part that actually needs arithmetic
Ad valorem simply means "according to value." Where a suit falls in this bucket, the fee is worked out as a percentage of the relief claimed, applied in slabs rather than a single flat rate across the whole amount. So a suit valued at Rs 5 lakh is not taxed the same way, slab for slab, as a suit valued at Rs 50 lakh, even though both are ad valorem.
Money recovery suits sit here almost always: unpaid loans, arrears of rent, cheque bounce compensation claimed as a civil sum, breach of contract damages. Suits for possession of immovable property are usually ad valorem too, valued either at the market value of the property or at a statutory formula depending on the specific relief. Suits for accounts, where the final sum only emerges after the accounting is done, also fall here.
Rough figures, purely to give a sense of scale (always confirm the exact slab against the current schedule or a calculator kept up to date): for a straightforward money recovery suit in the Rs 5 to 10 lakh range, the ad valorem fee typically lands in the low tens of thousands of rupees once the slabs are added up, not a flat 1 percent applied uniformly. As the claim moves into the tens of lakhs or crores, the fee climbs, but the marginal rate on the higher slabs is usually lower than the rate on the first slab. Multiplying the total claim by a single headline percentage gives the wrong number more often than not.
This is exactly the arithmetic the NyayX court fee calculator is built to handle. Enter the suit valuation and relief type, and it applies the current Delhi slabs rather than you doing it slab by slab on a notepad at the registry counter.
Fixed fee: suits where value does not drive the number
Some reliefs cannot sensibly be valued in rupees, or the law simply does not ask you to. These attract a flat fee that stays the same whatever the underlying dispute is worth.
Declaration suits, where the plaintiff wants a court to declare a right without any accompanying claim for possession or money, are typically fixed fee. Add a consequential relief, such as possession following the declaration, and the ad valorem component attaches to that part of the plaint even though the declaration itself stays fixed. Suits seeking only a permanent injunction, with no money claim attached, are usually fixed fee too, though registries look closely at whether the injunction is genuinely the sole relief. Matrimonial petitions before the family courts, divorce and judicial separation among them, carry a modest fixed fee, and a long list of miscellaneous applications across various provisions carry flat amounts set out in the schedule.
Fixed fee suits are easier to get right precisely because there is no valuation judgment call involved, but people still get the amount wrong when they use a stale figure from a form template that predates the last revision.
DRT court fee: scales with the debt, not the property
If you are filing an Original Application before a Debt Recovery Tribunal, the fee structure is different from a civil suit and is prescribed separately under the DRT rules rather than the Court Fees Act. It still scales with the amount claimed, but in its own slab table, and the fee at the low end of DRT jurisdiction (recall the DRT only takes matters above Rs 20 lakh) is a modest few thousand rupees, rising into much larger sums as the claim moves into crores. Securitisation Applications filed by a borrower challenging SARFAESI action carry their own fee, again set by the DRT rules rather than the Delhi civil court schedule.
The DRT registry will simply not register the OA if the fee attached does not match the claim amount, so this is not a place to estimate. If you handle recovery matters regularly, our explainer on what a Debt Recovery Tribunal actually is and how OA and SA filings work is worth reading alongside this if DRT practice is new to your chambers.
Where advocates actually get it wrong
The most common mistake is undervaluing a money suit to keep the fee down, hoping the registry will not notice. It usually notices, and the objection that follows costs more time than getting the number right the first time would have, since the plaint can be treated as filed only from the date the corrected fee is paid.
The second is treating a suit for specific performance like an ordinary money suit. Valuation here often turns on the value of the contract or the consideration paid rather than a straightforward claim amount, and it is one of the more argued points in Delhi registries. When the basis is genuinely unclear, note your reasoning in the plaint itself rather than leaving the registry to guess at your logic.
The third is stacking reliefs without rechecking each one separately. A plaint asking for declaration, possession, and mesne profits has to be valued relief by relief, not lumped together at a single number. Advocates who value the whole plaint as one relief tend to either overpay on the fixed part or underpay on the ad valorem part.
The fourth, and probably the most avoidable, is not checking whether the schedule has changed since the same relief was last filed. Delhi's court fee schedule has been amended more than once, and a fee that was correct in an old matter is not a safe reference point for a new one.
Paying the fee
Delhi has moved to online payment of court fee, generally called e court fee, for most civil filings. It is an online stamp purchased through the designated portal, and it generates a receipt with a reference number that gets appended to the plaint. Physical judicial stamp paper is no longer the standard route for most filings. District courts and the High Court have their own specific workflows for this, so confirm the process for the particular court you are filing in before the day you actually need to file.
Before you file
Run the valuation through the court fee calculator before drafting the plaint, not after. It saves a trip back to chambers when the registry sends the file back. If your practice covers matters across multiple Delhi courts, from district complexes to the DRT to the High Court, keeping the fee schedule and the case docket in one place is part of what our features are built around, and if you want to see how that fits your specific practice, a demo is the fastest way to find out. Getting the court fee right the first time is a small thing on its own, but it is one of the few filing errors that costs you a date rather than just an afternoon.