How long a divorce actually takes in India
Six months is the statute, not the answer. Here is what the published court data can tell you about the wait, what it cannot, and why nobody can quote you a number for your own court.
The short answer, and the honest one
The short answer is six months. That is section 13B(2) of the Hindu Marriage Act, it is fixed, and it is the number every other page on the internet gives you.
It is also not what you are asking. You are asking when this ends, and the six months is only the part nobody can change. The rest — how long until the first motion is listed, how long the second takes to come up after the wait is over, whether the matter goes to mediation first — is listing time, and it swings by months between one court complex and the next.
Here is the uncomfortable part: no court in India publishes that number. We went looking for it properly, and it is worth saying exactly what is there and what is not, because a great deal of what you will read elsewhere is presented with a confidence the underlying data does not support.
What is actually published
The National Judicial Data Grid is the judiciary's own live database, and it is genuinely good: it carries every district court in the country, updates daily, and lets anyone drill from the national figure down to a single establishment. As it stood when this page was written, the district courts held 5,19,97,640 pending cases — 1,12,26,452 civil and 4,07,71,188 criminal — spread across these ages.
| How long a pending case has been waiting | Share of all district court cases |
|---|---|
| Under one year | 40% |
| One to three years | 22% |
| Three to five years | 13% |
| Five to ten years | 16% |
| Over ten years | 9% |
What NJDG does not do, in its public view, is separate family courts from everything else, or matrimonial matters from other civil cases. So the honest reading of that table is: this is the weather in the building your case is heard in. It is not the forecast for your case.
The gap is not for want of looking. The most recent independent study to measure disposal time across district courts by state — covering fourteen High Courts and twelve states at district tier — excluded family and matrimonial matters entirely from its first phase. The people who do this for a living have not published it either.
What the wider data does tell you
Three findings are worth carrying into your own expectations.
The first hearing predicts the whole case. Analysing around three million cases across three thousand subordinate courts, DAKSH found a strong positive correlation — 0.63 — between how long a case takes to reach its first hearing and how long it takes to finish altogether. That is the single most useful number on this page. It means the early listing interval is not a preliminary you wait through; it is the best available signal of the whole timeline.
Disposed cases finish faster than pending cases suggest. In the same work, cases that were filed and resolved between 2010 and 2016 took an average of around fifteen months. The average pending case is roughly four years old. Both are true at once, and the difference between them is the long tail of contested matters — not the typical uncontested one.
The backlog is a staffing problem, and it is getting worse. Pendency across all three tiers passed fifty-four million at the end of 2025, and subordinate court pendency has risen around 85% in a decade. Delhi's subordinate court pendency has tripled over that period; Maharashtra's has doubled. Roughly one in three district court cases has now been waiting more than five years. The India Justice Report puts subordinate court judge vacancies at about 21%, and High Court vacancies at about 33%. Vacancies are why listing intervals move: a transferred judge is felt on your date.
Family courts are not invisible in this. In 2025 the Delhi High Court, hearing a petition about inordinate delay in matrimonial matters, directed the Delhi government to report on how many family judges were sitting, what was on each court's board, and the state of the infrastructure. That a High Court had to ask tells you the figure was not sitting anywhere public.
So what should you expect?
An uncontested mutual consent divorce, filed complete, with a finished settlement and both parties able to attend, is a matter of months rather than years — the statutory six, plus two listing intervals either side of it. That is the shape of it, and any advocate who has appeared in your court can tell you what those intervals are running at this season. What nobody can do — including us — is publish a table of them and stand behind it.
Which is why the city pages on this site carry what the advocate who actually appears in that complex says about it, and this page does not pretend to a precision that does not exist.
Find the answer for your own court
The listing interval you care about is the one in your complex, so go straight to it. Each page below covers which court hears your matter, what it costs there, how long it has been taking, and what that bench has been doing with waiver applications.
- Delhi — Saket, Tis Hazari, Rohini and Dwarka, where the choice between complexes is itself worth making carefully
- Mumbai — Family Court, Bandra
- Bengaluru
- Hyderabad
- Chennai
- Pune
- Kolkata
- Ahmedabad
- Jaipur
- Noida
- Faridabad
Somewhere else, or outside India? The court that hears you is decided by where the marriage was solemnised, where you last lived together, or where the respondent lives now — and the session below works the same wherever that lands.
The part that is fixed
Three numbers come from the statute rather than the court. Until recently all three were treated as immovable. Two of them are not.
| What | How long | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Living apart before you can file at all | One year — waivable, see below | Section 13B(1), Hindu Marriage Act |
| Between the first motion and the second | Six months — waivable since 2017 | Section 13B(2) |
| Outer limit for the second motion | Eighteen months, after which the petition lapses | Section 13B(2) |
The year moved in December 2025. The six months under 13B(2) has been waivable since Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur (2017). The year of separation under 13B(1) was treated as a hard precondition until 17 December 2025, when a Full Bench of the Delhi High Court — Justices Navin Chawla, Anup Jairam Bhambhani and Renu Bhatnagar — held that it too is directory rather than mandatory, and can be waived where there is exceptional hardship to the petitioner or exceptional depravity on the part of the respondent. The Court added two things worth keeping in mind: it is not to be granted merely for the asking, and the two waivers are considered independently of each other.
That is a Delhi judgment. Outside Delhi it is persuasive rather than binding, and it is new enough that practice is still settling — which is exactly the kind of thing worth asking your own advocate about rather than reading off a page. The eighteen-month outer limit is untouched.
A civil marriage registered under the Special Marriage Act, 1954 runs on the same pattern under section 28. Muslim, Christian and Parsi marriages each have their own law and their own periods.
Where the extra months actually go
Nobody's divorce takes exactly six months, and the overrun is almost never the six months. It is these four, in roughly this order of frequency.
Listing intervals
Your petition is filed on a Tuesday; the first motion is heard when the court has a date. That interval moves with the judge, with vacancies and transfers, and with the load the complex is carrying that season. It applies twice — once before the wait and once after it — which is why two matters filed the same week in two cities finish months apart.
Mediation, which is not optional
Section 9 of the Family Courts Act, 1984 puts a duty on the court to attempt a settlement in every proceeding, and in K. Srinivas Rao v. D.A. Deepa (2013) the Supreme Court directed courts to refer matrimonial disputes to mediation at the earliest opportunity.
So a matter arriving with an unfinished settlement gets sent to the attached mediation centre. That is the court doing its job, not a setback — but it adds weeks nobody budgeted for, and it is the single most avoidable delay on this page.
An incomplete settlement
The most expensive weeks in a mutual consent divorce are spent agreeing something that could have been agreed before filing. A settlement with an open term — a figure left blank, a date unnamed, the flat described but the loan not — comes back for another date. Finishing it first is the whole difference between the fast column and the slow one.
Somebody who cannot attend
Both parties attend both motions. Where one lives abroad, that is a real scheduling problem and sometimes a jurisdictional one. In Santhini v. Vijaya Venketesh (2018) the Supreme Court held, by majority, that video conferencing should not ordinarily be resorted to in matrimonial proceedings. Practice moved afterwards — the Supreme Court's e-Committee issued Model Rules for Video Conferencing for Courts (2020), and video conferencing follows the rules of the parent High Court — but whether a particular bench allows it in a mutual consent matter remains discretionary, and what it accepts in place of personal appearance usually means a power of attorney executed abroad and consularised or apostilled.
What a waiver does to the number
In Amardeep Singh v. Harveen Kaur (2017) the Supreme Court held that the six months under section 13B(2) is directory, not mandatory. A family court can waive it where the couple has genuinely lived apart well beyond the statutory period, mediation has failed, everything between them is settled, and waiting further would only prolong the agony.
Granted, it removes the six months and leaves the listing intervals — which is why the waiver column above is short but never immediate. Refused, it costs the weeks the application itself took. If you are three months from the second motion anyway, that trade is worth thinking about honestly.
The settlement is what carries the application. What the six-month cooling-off period really means sets out what a court expects to see.
Contested is a different question
Everything above is mutual consent. A contested petition is measured in years rather than months, and the honest answer depends on the grounds, how much of the evidence is disputed, and whether there are parallel proceedings — maintenance, custody, a domestic violence complaint — running alongside it. Anybody quoting you a number for a contested divorce without knowing the grounds is guessing.
One thing worth knowing: a family court cannot grant a divorce on irretrievable breakdown, because it is not a ground in the Act. The Supreme Court can, under Article 142, as it confirmed in Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan (2023) — but that power belongs to the Supreme Court alone. People read about those judgments and arrive expecting their own family court to apply them. It cannot.
The decree is not quite the end
Two more intervals sit past the date you are counting to. The certified copy of the decree takes time to issue, and it is the document every other institution will ask for. And under section 28(4) of the Hindu Marriage Act an appeal may be preferred within ninety days, which matters if you are planning to remarry.
What actually shortens it
- Finish the settlement before you file. Every figure, every date, nothing left open. This is worth more than everything else on this list combined.
- Choose the court deliberately where more than one has jurisdiction — where the marriage was solemnised, where you last lived together, or where the respondent lives now.
- Have the dated proof of separation ready rather than asserted: separate addresses on documents, rent agreements, bills.
- File complete. A petition returned for a missing annexure costs a full listing interval, not a day.
- Sort out the appearance problem early if one of you is abroad, before the first date rather than after it.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is public, and here is exactly where each one lives, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
- Pending case counts and the age table — National Judicial Data Grid, district courts, read September 2026. It updates daily, so the totals will have moved by the time you look; the shape of the distribution moves slowly.
- Decade trends, state figures and the five-year share — Data For India, compiled from NJDG and Ministry of Law and Justice answers in Parliament.
- Judicial vacancies — India Justice Report 2025.
- First-hearing correlation and average disposal time — DAKSH, from its analysis of subordinate court case data.
- The Delhi family courts order — reported in 2025 on the Delhi High Court's direction to the Delhi government to file a status report on family court pendency and infrastructure.
- The statutory periods — the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 and the Special Marriage Act, 1954, which you can read in full.
The six months between motions is fixed by statute. Everything around it depends on the court, the judge and the day — and anyone who tells you otherwise with a number attached should be asked where they got it.
Talk to a lawyer
If you want the real number for your own matter, the fastest way to get it is to ask somebody who appears in that court.
Book a guided session — ₹3,999. Fifty minutes online, at a time you choose, wherever you are: every question answered, an honest timeline for your own court, and your petition, affidavit and settlement drafted for that court afterwards. It is online, so the city you are in decides which court we draft for, not whether we can help.