What a parental order actually costs

The court fee for a parental order is £270.

That is the whole answer to the narrow question, and it is far less than most people expect. The wider question — what the process costs you in total — depends almost entirely on one decision: whether you use a solicitor.

This page sets out every cost, including the ones nobody mentions until the invoice arrives.

Figures verified September 2026. Court fees change; check the current EX50A before you file.

The court fee: £270

Fee code FEE0275, "Application for parental order", set out in the EX50A schedule of civil and family court fees. It is payable once, when you file Form C51, and it covers the whole application however many hearings it takes.

It is the same whether you are a couple applying under s.54 or a single applicant under s.54A, and the same whether your child was born in Manchester or Bogotá.

If £270 is difficult

The Help with Fees scheme can reduce or remove the fee entirely depending on your income, savings and whether you receive certain benefits. You apply using Form EX160, and you should do it before or at the same time as filing — not afterwards.

It is worth checking even if you assume you will not qualify. The thresholds catch more people than expected, particularly households that have just dropped to one income because a baby arrived.

Legal fees: £0, or £6,000–£10,000, or somewhere sensible in between

This is the number that decides your total, and it is genuinely a choice rather than a fixed cost.

Doing it yourself: £0. A straightforward parental order application is administrative rather than adversarial. Nobody is opposing you. Families complete the process themselves every week.

Full representation: typically £6,000–£10,000 for a straightforward international case, and more where anything is unusual or contested. What you are buying is someone else carrying the accuracy risk and the admin burden — which, with a newborn and a foreign birth certificate, is a real thing to be buying.

Advice on the one hard part: a few hundred pounds. The option nobody advertises. Most specialist surrogacy solicitors will do a fixed-fee advice session, or review your bundle before you file. If your case is ordinary except for one wrinkle, this removes most of the risk for a fraction of the cost.

Which of these is right for you is not a budget question, it is a case-complexity question. We wrote a separate page on how to tell which one you are, and a free two-minute check that runs the test against your actual circumstances.

The costs nobody warns you about

These are small individually and they are where the budget quietly goes, particularly after an overseas birth.

Translation. Every foreign-language document going before the court needs a translation. Birth certificate, surrogacy agreement, the surrogate's ID, clinic records, sometimes her marriage certificate. Certified translation runs roughly £30–£100 per document depending on language and length. Budget for more documents than you think you have.

Legalisation and apostilles. Foreign public documents often need an apostille from the issuing country to be accepted. Costs and timescales vary enormously by country, and in some jurisdictions this is the slowest step in the entire process. Start it early — this is a common cause of families running at the six-month deadline.

Certified copies. You will need more of them than you expect, of more things than you expect.

Getting your surrogate's consent taken. If your surrogate is overseas and does not speak English, expect the Cafcass reporter to need interpretation. There may be costs attached, and there is certainly time attached.

Travel. Hearings are generally short, and remote attendance is increasingly common, but do not assume it.

Your child's immigration and passport costs. Strictly a separate process from the parental order, but it lands in the same six months and the same bank account. This is frequently the largest non-legal cost of bringing a child home, and it comes before the parental order rather than after.

What the process does not cost

Two reassurances, because both come up constantly:

There is no fee for the Cafcass reporter. The parental order reporter is appointed by the court under Family Procedure Rule 13.5 and is not charged to you.

There is no fee for the order itself, or for the entry in the Parental Order Register, or for the hearings. The £270 covers it.

A realistic total

Every route below carries the same £270 court fee and the same £150–£500 for documents and translation. What actually varies is the legal spend.

Route	Legal spend	Realistic total
Self-managed, ordinary case	£0	£420–£770
Self-managed + targeted advice	£300–£800	£720–£1,570
Full representation	£6,000–£10,000	£6,420–£10,770

None of these include the cost of the surrogacy arrangement itself, which dwarfs all of them and is a separate question entirely.

The cost that matters most

The expensive failure in this process is not choosing the wrong route. It is missing the six-month deadline, or filing an application with a defect that has to be fixed later, or discovering at the eleventh hour that your surrogate's consent was taken too early and has to be taken again.

Those cost time you cannot buy back and, if they push you outside the window, they turn a £270 administrative application into a case that genuinely needs a solicitor. Spending a little on getting it right the first time is almost always cheaper than the alternative.

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