§ 12.005.Filing Fees

A short fee provision, and two of its four subsections were repealed in 2022.

The fee for filing an action under this chapter is the fee that generally applies to the filing of a civil case.

No special charge attaches, which keeps the action as accessible as any other.

A plaintiff who is unable to pay the filing fee and the fee for service of notice may file an affidavit of inability to pay under the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure.

That matters more here than in most chapters. A person whose property has been clouded by a fraudulent lien may be unable to borrow against it, sell it, or raise money at all — and the filing is often designed to produce exactly that.

Naming both fees is deliberate. The relief is worthless without service, so a plaintiff excused from the filing fee alone would still be stopped.

Subsections (b) and (d) were repealed in 2022 by the court cost consolidation, which moved a set of specific fee provisions out of individual chapters and into the general civil fee structure.

What remains is the general rule and the inability-to-pay route, both pointing outward — to the general fee schedule and to the rules.

The affidavit route connects this chapter to the next one, which governs when a court may dismiss a claim filed on such an affidavit as frivolous.