You get as far as the second screen before the service names the price: £628 to apply, the figure since 13 July 2026. The form beneath it is D8. Neither the price nor the form is what actually stops people.
What stops them is the box, three screens in, that asks whether you’re doing this on your own or together — and the small, cold realisation that you have to decide, now, what kind of ending this is going to be.
You’re at the kitchen table with a laptop and a marriage certificate that took twenty minutes to find. The certificate matters more than the fee. Since 6 April 2022, England and Wales has had no-fault divorce: you no longer accuse anyone of anything, itemise no dates, produce no “unreasonable behaviour”, no two years of separation set out politely for a stranger. You confirm one thing — that the marriage has broken down irretrievably — and the court must take that statement as conclusive. It is, on paper, the most humane the law has ever managed to be about this. It is also, in practice, a wait.
First, the gate nobody warns you about. You cannot apply until you’ve been married at least a year. Not eleven months. A year. Inside that window the service simply won’t let you through, and there is no form for impatience.
Then the choice you glimpsed on screen three. You can apply alone — a sole application — or jointly, both names on one statement. Joint sounds civilised, and often is, but it asks two people to keep pressing buttons in sequence for six months; if one of them stops, the other has to carry it on alone as a sole application anyway. Sole gives you control and the job of making sure the papers actually reach your spouse. There’s no correct answer. There’s only the one that survives the next twenty weeks.
Twenty weeks is the part that surprises everyone. From the day the court *issues* your application — not the day you submit it, the day it issues — you must wait twenty weeks before you can apply for the conditional order, the court’s confirmation that you’re entitled to the divorce. Then a second wait: six weeks and a day after the conditional order before you can apply for the final order, the document that actually ends the marriage. Add it up and the law’s own minimum is roughly twenty-six weeks. Half a year, built in on purpose, so that nobody divorces in a temper.
The rest of the friction is smaller and somehow more maddening than the wait. Your names have to match the marriage certificate exactly — the version of you from the wedding day, middle names and maiden names and all, not the name you go by now. Your spouse needs a current address, so the application can be served. If money is tight, Help with Fees, applied for online at GOV.UK in about a minute, can reduce or cover the £628, and both Citizens Advice and the GOV.UK divorce service will take you through the online route for nothing. And a thing the form stays quiet about: the divorce ends the marriage and nothing else. Money and children are separate questions, settled by their own orders. The final order does not, by itself, sort the house.
None of it is difficult. It is only precise — and precision at a kitchen table, at night, about your own marriage, is a great deal to ask of anyone. The applications that stall rarely fail dramatically. A name that doesn’t match the certificate. A sole-or-joint decision made quickly and regretted slowly. A twenty-week clock that started later than you thought, because “submitted” and “issued” were never the same date.
This is where Chris comes in, late and quietly. You describe the situation in plain words — how long married, alone or jointly, the names exactly as they sit on that certificate — and Chris helps you build the application itself: the sole-or-joint choice explained, the statement of irretrievable breakdown set out cleanly, the fee and Help-with-Fees position spelled out, the dates ordered so the twenty-week wait begins when it’s supposed to. Not advice on whether to divorce. The document, done properly, so the form stops being the thing in your way.
What you end with is the thing you sat down to make: a completed divorce application, ready to file, with no box left guessing.
Come back when the conditional order is due — the next form is kinder than this one.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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