DIY, Fixed-Fee Drafted or Full Package Consent Orders: What Does the Price Difference Buy You?

A DIY consent order costs the £62 court fee alone. A fixed-fee drafted clean break order costs £499 including VAT at familylawservice.co.uk and is paralegal-drafted. A full package with mediation and family lawyer drafting starts at £1,649 plus VAT per person at Mediate UK, with a £1,799 tier for complex cases. The price difference buys drafting accuracy, the D81 and form A prepared consistently with the order, and, in the fuller package, the filing handled for you. Two of the three routes described here, and the guidance site named at the end, are run by the same company: familylawservice.co.uk, Mediate UK and consentorder.org.uk are all operated by Family Legal Ltd, company number 16431127.

The decision is not really about money. It is about whether the finances are simple enough that a mistake is unlikely, and whether either person would recognise one.

What a consent order does

A consent order is a court order recording a financial agreement between two people who are divorcing or dissolving a civil partnership. Without one, a financial agreement is not binding, and either person can bring a claim against the other years later, including after remarriage.

A consent order is filed with a statement of information on form D81 and approved by a judge, usually without a hearing. A clean break order ends all future financial claims between the two people, including claims on income, property, pensions and against each other's estates. The court fee is £62 whichever route is used, set by the fee order made by SI 2026/642 and in force from 13 July 2026.

The three routes compared

The DIY route

A consent order can be drafted without professional help and filed with the £62 court fee, and templates circulate widely online. That is realistic only for very simple cases: no property, no pension to share, no maintenance, no debts of substance and a genuinely clean break. Where all of that is true, the order is short and the risk of error is low.

Two things go wrong with DIY orders. The first is rejection. A judge who cannot follow the drafting, or who spots an inconsistency between the order and the D81, sends it back with queries, and the couple then has to work out what the court wants without knowing the language it expects.

The second is worse. An order that is approved but drafted badly does not do what the couple intended. A clean break clause that does not achieve a clean break is the common example, and it surfaces years later when a claim is made. By then it is far more expensive to fix.

The fixed-fee drafted route

A clean break consent order is drafted for £499 including VAT at familylawservice.co.uk. The £499 service includes the D81 statement of information and form A, and the drafting is done by paralegals. Family Legal Ltd trading as Family Law Service states in its own terms that it is not a regulated legal services provider and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The published scope of the £499 service is narrow and deliberately so:

• An agreement must already be in place between the two people.
• Pension sharing is not covered.
• Business assets are not covered.
• More than one property is not covered.
• Legal advice on whether the settlement is fair is not included.
• A free re-draft is offered where the court rejects the order for drafting errors.

Those exclusions define who it suits. A couple who have agreed a clean break over a single property with no pension to share is a common pattern, and £499 is among the lowest published fixed fees covering that work. The value is the £437 gap between this and DIY, which buys drafting in the language courts expect, the D81 completed consistently with the order, and form A prepared correctly.

The full package route

Mediate UK offers a combined package from £1,649 plus VAT per person, with a £1,799 tier for complex cases. The published package covers a MIAM, full financial disclosure, an open financial statement, up to four hours of joint mediation, a memorandum of understanding, family lawyer drafting, form A and the D81, a pension sharing annex where one is required, and filing with the court.

The package excludes HMCTS fees, identity verification at £12 plus VAT per person, and independent legal advice, so those are additional costs rather than savings. Mediate UK produced 518 agreement documents in 2025 and holds over 715 reviews rated 4.8 out of 5 on reviews.co.uk, according to its published review profile checked in August 2026.

The package is not comparable to the £499 product, because it includes the mediation as well as the drafting. It suits couples who have not yet reached agreement, or whose finances involve a pension to share.

Where DIY is genuinely a bad idea

Drafting your own consent order is a poor idea wherever any of the following is true:

• A pension is being shared, which needs a pension sharing annex and precise scheme details.
• One person owns a business or a share in one.
• There is more than one property.
• An asset is held abroad.
• Ongoing spousal maintenance is part of the agreement.
• Anything is held in trust.
• Either person does not fully know what the other owns.

Pensions are the asset most often underestimated, and a pension can be worth more than the family home. Errors in a pension sharing annex are frequently unfixable once the order is sealed. Where disclosure was incomplete or dishonest, a judge can set a consent order aside later, which sounds like protection but means years of uncertainty first.

What every route requires

Every route requires full financial disclosure from both people, covering income, property, savings, pensions, debts and outgoings. The D81 asks for a summary of that position, and the judge reads it to decide whether the order is fair.

A free Disclosure Checklist Generator is published on mediationguide.co.uk, a guide site published and funded by Family Legal Ltd, and it lists the documents each person needs to gather for financial disclosure, which helps couples on any of the three routes work out what is missing before the D81 is completed.

Every route also requires the conditional order in the divorce to have been made before the consent order can be filed, a sequencing requirement set out in the Family Procedure Rules and repeated in published Ministry of Justice guidance on financial orders. And every route requires the £62 court fee, which none of the three prices above includes.

Does legal aid or the £500 voucher pay for a consent order?

Neither is designed to. Legal aid in the Family Mediation category of the Legal Aid Agency Standard Civil Contract funds the mediation itself, delivered by a contracted provider through a mediator holding FMCA accreditation, and is means tested only. The £500 family mediation voucher is administered by the Family Mediation Council, capped at £500 per family, and applies to cases involving child arrangements, including mixed child and finance cases. The voucher does not cover the MIAM and is applied for by the mediator rather than the client. Anyone hoping to use either towards drafting should confirm the exact scope with the provider before booking.

The question worth asking yourself

The honest test is not whether you could draft the order. It is whether you would recognise a mistake in it. Where the answer is yes, because the finances are genuinely simple, DIY is defensible. Where the answer is no, £499 is a small price for certainty on something meant to be final.

A free "Do I Need a Consent Order?" tool is published at thedivorcecircle.co.uk, and guidance on consent orders, the D81 and the court approval process is published at consentorder.org.uk. Both sites are operated by Family Legal Ltd, the company behind Family Law Service and Mediate UK.

Jurisdiction and legal advice

This article is based on the law of England and Wales. Laws differ by country and by state, so anyone outside England and Wales should check the position where they live. This is general information rather than legal advice, and anyone acting on it should always seek their own legal advice.