If you’re planning on getting divorced or are already in the process, you no doubt have a lot of questions, including how long you’ll have to wait before your divorce is final. It can be hard to move on until you have that final settlement agreement or judgment.
In 2019, we surveyed our readers who’d recently been through a divorce. Here’s what we learned about the length of the process—from the time they filed the petition until they signed a final agreement or got a final judgment—and why it took longer in some cases than in others.
Typical Times to Complete a Divorce
The readers we surveyed in 2019 reported that it took an average of one year to get through a divorce. But the overall average is only part of the picture. Nearly 4 in 10 (39%) completed the process in six months or less. On the other end of the time scale, more than 1 in 10 (13%) had to wait over two years before their divorce was final—and most of those readers said it took 30 or more months to resolve all of their divorce issues.
Why such a big variation in the length of the process? As our survey showed, two factors make the biggest difference: the number of contested issues in your divorce, and whether you settle those disputes or go to trial.
How Disputes Make Divorce Take Longer
Our 2019 survey confirmed what anyone who’s been through a divorce likely already knows: the more disagreements you have with your spouse about major issues in your divorce, the longer it will take to resolve those disputes (and the more you’ll probably pay in divorce costs).
The most important issues that take time to resolve are:
- child support and custody
- alimony (also known as spousal support), and
- dividing your marital property and debts.
Couples who agree on how to deal with these issues—or simply don’t have children or property to fight over—can get through the process relatively quickly. For the readers in our survey who didn’t have any contested issues, it took just under eight months to complete a divorce.
Once you start adding contested issues into the mix, however, the process takes longer—sometimes considerably longer. The average divorce duration jumped to 12 months for readers with one contested issue, and it climbed steadily from there: 13 months for two disputes, and 16 months for three or more issues.
Resolving disputes requires time to gather all the necessary information, try to negotiate a settlement, and sometimes file motions and appear at hearings.
Divorce Discovery
The information-gathering process known as divorce discovery is often focused on financial issues, such as exchanging information about income and determining the value of any assets (especially the family home and pensions or other retirement accounts). If necessary, you may have to file (or respond to) a subpoena to produce documents or appear at a deposition.
Depending on the issues in your case, discovery may also involve having experts conduct a child custody evaluation, a psychological evaluation, or a vocational analysis if you or your spouse are requesting alimony.
The discovery process can take months—or even longer if you’re dealing with complicated assets, particularly thorny custody issues, or a spouse who’s not cooperating.
Motions and Hearings During Divorce
Some people assume that avoiding trial means you won’t have to deal with going to court. That’s not necessarily true. To resolve disputes, you (or your lawyer) may have to file motions to ask the court to issue orders on issues such as:
- temporary child support while the divorce is pending
- temporary child custody or visitation
- temporary spousal support, or
- forcing an uncooperative spouse to turn over documents (known as a “motion to compel discovery”).
Whenever a motion is filed, the other spouse has a certain amount of time to respond. Then the judge may need to schedule a hearing before making a decision. All of this takes time, especially when court calendars are crowded and lawyers have full schedules.
Settlement Negotiations and Mediation
The time it will take to negotiate a settlement agreement depends on many factors including:
- the number and nature of the contested issues in your case
- the value of the assets at stake
- how well you and your spouse can communicate and compromise, and
- whether either spouse's lawyer has taken an overly aggressive approach to divorce.
Depending on where you live and the issues involved, the court may order you to go to divorce mediation, where a neutral, certified mediator will meet with both spouses and try to help you reach an agreement on your disputes. Mediation isn’t a lengthy process but can take some time, especially if the mediator’s calendar is full.
How Going to Trial Affects the Duration of Divorce
Even though settlement talks can drag on and on in some cases—especially when at least one spouse is being unreasonable or uncooperative—you’ll still typically get through your divorce quicker if you settle than if you go to trial. In our 2019 survey, it took an average of 18 months to resolve one or more issues by going to trial, compared to 13 months when the couples settled their disputes.
That extra six months, on average, comes from all the steps involved in a divorce trial, which may include:
- gathering more evidence
- filing and responding to pretrial motions
- attending a pretrial conference
- the trial itself, which may be spread out over several days (or even weeks), and
- waiting for the final divorce judgment after the trial is over.
In places with crowded court calendars—and at a time when many court budgets have been slashed—the divorce process can be delayed even more because of the time it takes to get hearings and trials scheduled.
What Can You Do to Speed Up the Divorce Process?
The upshot from our 2019 survey is that if you want to get through your divorce as quickly as possible, you should try to be reasonable when working out a settlement that will be fair for both you and your spouse—rather than holding out for unreasonable results. An experienced family lawyer can help you understand what a reasonable settlement would be.
Of course, your divorce may be taking a long time due to factors outside of your control, including your spouse’s combative attitude or delaying tactics. When that’s the case, it’s especially important to find a lawyer who can protect your interests. As our survey also revealed, the more contested issues in a divorce, the more likely it was that readers hired divorce lawyers.
