Consumer court fees and jurisdiction: what you pay, and where you file

Two questions people ask as one

"Consumer court fees" and "consumer court jurisdiction" are searched as though they were one topic, and on most pages they are answered in a single breath. They are different questions with different consequences, and the only thing they share is the number they are computed from.

What it costs is a question about money, and the answer is usually "nothing" — a flat amount from a schedule, not a percentage of anything, and nil below ₹5 lakh of consideration. Get it wrong and you pay ₹1,000 instead of ₹400, which is annoying and fixable. Which commission hears it is a question about power: a commission can only decide a complaint inside its pecuniary limits, and getting that wrong means the complaint is returned, with the months spent getting there coming straight off your two years.

So the fee is the cheap mistake and the forum is the expensive one. The tool above answers both from the single figure they depend on. The rest of this page is about the cases where working out that figure is not obvious.

What counts as "the consideration paid" when the answer is not obvious

The rule itself is short. Sections 34(1), 47(1)(a)(i) and 58(1)(a)(i) of the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 each give their commission jurisdiction by reference to "the value of the goods or services paid as consideration", and the Consumer Protection (Jurisdiction …) Rules, 2021 set the three amounts at ₹50 lakh and ₹2 crore.

Applying it is where people come unstuck, because a real transaction rarely presents itself as a single clean price. You paid part of it. Someone else paid it. The thing that failed was bundled free with something you did pay for. You bought the same defective item four times. The service is billed monthly and you have been billed for nineteen months. None of that is covered on the pages that state the rule and stop.

Where a figure is genuinely arguable, plead the basis of the valuation in the complaint itself, so the commission rules on it at the threshold rather than months later.

The fee schedule in full, and what the fee is not

The fee is fixed by Rule 7(2) of the Consumer Protection (Consumer Disputes Redressal Commissions) Rules, 2020, as substituted by G.S.R. 892(E) of 20 December 2022. That substitution is the reason so many published fee tables are wrong: the original 2020 table was written against the pecuniary limits as they stood before the 2021 Rules, so a table copied from a 2020-vintage source carries correct amounts sitting under the wrong commissions.

There are eleven slabs, and the whole schedule is reproduced below and in the tool above. The thing worth noticing is how small the numbers are. The maximum fee anywhere in the District Commission range — that is, for anything you paid up to ₹50 lakh for — is ₹1,000. Cost is not a reason not to file a consumer complaint, and any service quoting you a large "court fee" for a small consumer matter is quoting you something other than the court fee.

• It is not ad valorem. There is no percentage of the claim anywhere in the schedule. A ₹9 lakh purchase and a ₹6 lakh purchase both attract ₹200.
• It is not stamp duty and it is not a court fee under a State Court Fees Act. Those regimes do not apply to a complaint before a consumer commission.
• It is not a fee to speak to anybody. Registering on e-Jagriti is free, the National Consumer Helpline is free, and no filing fee at all is payable below ₹5 lakh of consideration.
• Rule 7(1) requires the fee by crossed demand draft on a nationalised bank or by crossed Indian Postal Order in favour of the President of the District Commission or the Registrar of the State or National Commission — or by electronic mode where the commission has arranged for it, which e-Jagriti has for online filings.
• A separate incidental cost that is not the filing fee: notarising the affidavit that accompanies the complaint, and postage. Together that is usually a few hundred rupees.

What happens if you file in the wrong commission

Nothing dramatic, and that is the problem — the damage is entirely in the time. A complaint filed in a commission with no pecuniary jurisdiction over it is not transferred into the right one. It is returned, or dismissed for want of jurisdiction, and you file afresh.

The Act does contain transfer provisions: s. 48 lets a State Commission move a case between District Commissions within the State, and s. 62 lets the National Commission move one from a State Commission. Both operate on a party's application for reasons such as convenience. Neither converts a complaint filed in the wrong tier into one filed in the right tier.

And the clock does not pause for you. The two-year limitation under s. 69 runs from the cause of action, not from the date you first tried to file, and no provision in the Act excludes time spent prosecuting in the wrong pecuniary forum. The general principles about a bona fide prosecution in a court unable to entertain it can be argued, but arguing them puts you at the mercy of a condonation application rather than leaving you a right. Get the forum right the first time.

What this tool models, and what it refuses to

The tool does one piece of arithmetic: it takes a rupee figure, finds the slab it falls in, and reports the fee and the commission for that slab. Everything it displays is a lookup against a published schedule. It has no view about your case.

That matters because the difficult part of this question is not the lookup. It is deciding what number to put in, and a confident answer computed from the wrong figure is worse than no answer at all — it is the same failure as a limitation calculator given the wrong start date.

Worked examples