How to Get a Divorce in Virginia: Grounds, Filing, and Final Decree

To get a divorce in Virginia, at least one spouse must have lived in the state for six months, and then you file a complaint in the circuit court where either spouse lives, on either no-fault grounds after a period of separation or fault grounds such as adultery, cruelty, desertion, or a felony conviction.¹² After filing, you serve your spouse, negotiate or litigate custody, support, and property, and finish with a hearing where the judge enters the final decree.

Meet the Residency Requirement

Virginia requires that at least one spouse be a “bona fide resident and domiciliary” of the state for a minimum of six months before filing.¹ That means more than being physically present. You have to show an intent to make Virginia your permanent home, which you can demonstrate with a Virginia driver’s license, voter registration, or steady employment here.

Military service members get a helpful presumption. If you have been stationed in Virginia for six months or more before filing, you are presumed to meet the residency requirement even if your permanent home of record is elsewhere.¹

Choose Your Grounds for Divorce

Virginia recognizes both no-fault and fault-based grounds. The path you choose affects your waiting period, the evidence you need, and sometimes how the court decides support and property.

No-Fault Grounds

A no-fault divorce requires that you and your spouse live separately, without cohabitation, for a set period. For couples with minor children, the separation must last at least a year. If you have no minor children and both spouses have signed a written separation agreement resolving property, support, and all other issues, the waiting period drops to six months.² The separation has to be continuous and uninterrupted, with the intent that it be permanent.³ Reconciling and moving back in resets the clock.

Fault Grounds

Fault-based divorce requires you to prove your spouse’s misconduct. Virginia recognizes four grounds:

Adultery or sexual acts outside the marriage, proved by clear and convincing evidence, which is a higher bar than the standard used in most civil cases.
Cruelty or reasonable apprehension of bodily hurt, meaning conduct that creates a genuine fear of physical harm and not just emotional unhappiness.
Desertion, meaning one spouse abandoning the other without justification.
Felony conviction, where a spouse is sentenced to more than one year, actually imprisoned, and cohabitation is not resumed afterward.

For cruelty and desertion, you have to wait one year from the date of the act before the court can grant the divorce.² Adultery has no mandatory waiting period, which is one reason some spouses file on fault grounds even when a no-fault case would eventually be available. A finding of fault can also affect spousal support and, in limited cases, property division.

File the Complaint

The divorce case starts when you file a complaint (sometimes called a bill of complaint) in the circuit court of the county or city where either spouse lives.⁴ The complaint names both spouses, states when and where you married, sets out your grounds, and lists what you want the court to decide on custody, support, and property.

The clerk’s filing fee is $50.⁵ Expect further costs on top of that: service of process fees, and attorney’s fees if you hire one. Once you file, the clerk assigns a case number and issues a summons that has to be delivered to your spouse along with the complaint.

Serve Your Spouse

Your spouse has to receive formal notice before the case moves forward. Virginia allows three main methods:

Personal delivery, where a sheriff’s deputy or private process server hands the complaint and summons to your spouse.
Substituted service, where the documents are left with a household member at least 16 years old and a copy is mailed to your spouse.
Service by publication, where the court authorizes notice in a local newspaper when your spouse’s location is genuinely unknown despite diligent effort.⁶

Once served, your spouse typically has 21 days to file a response. If they do nothing, you can ask for a default judgment, though the court will still require testimony or evidence before granting the divorce. If your spouse is on active military duty, federal law adds protections: a court must verify military service before entering a default judgment and, if the service member has not appeared, postpone the case for at least 90 days when there may be a valid defense that cannot be presented without them.⁷

Ask for Temporary Orders While the Case Is Pending

Divorce cases often take months, and sometimes over a year, to resolve. Virginia allows the court to enter temporary (pendente lite) orders at any point in the case to stabilize your situation. These orders can:

Require one spouse to pay temporary spousal support, including health insurance costs.
Set an interim custody arrangement and calculate child support under the state’s guidelines.
Grant one spouse exclusive use of the marital residence.
Order a spouse to keep an existing life insurance policy in force and name the other spouse or children as beneficiaries.
Prohibit either spouse from dissipating or hiding marital property.⁸

Temporary orders stay in effect until the final decree replaces them. If your situation is urgent, particularly with domestic violence or financial abuse, request temporary relief early.

Complete the Parenting Education Requirement

When custody, visitation, or child support is contested, both parents have to attend a court-approved parenting education seminar. You need proof that you completed the seminar within the 12 months before your court appearance, or a commitment to attend within 45 days after.⁸ The seminars cover the effects of separation on children, co-parenting, and conflict resolution.⁹ Fees vary by provider. Skip it and your case can stall.

Settle or Litigate

Most Virginia divorces settle rather than go to trial. Courts routinely encourage mediation because it tends to be faster, cheaper, and less hostile than a contested hearing. A neutral mediator helps you and your spouse work through property division, custody schedules, and support without a judge deciding everything for you.

When mediation works, the result is a written settlement agreement covering assets, debts, custody, visitation, and support. Once both spouses sign and the court approves it, the agreement gets incorporated into the final divorce decree and carries the force of a court order.

Mediation is a poor fit when there is domestic violence, when the power dynamic is badly unbalanced, or when one spouse may be hiding assets. In those cases, litigation with formal discovery is the safer path.

Divide Property and Debts

Virginia is an equitable distribution state, so the court divides marital property fairly, which does not necessarily mean equally. Everything you own and owe gets classified first:

Separate property, meaning anything one spouse owned before the marriage, inherited, or received as a gift from someone other than the other spouse. Separate property generally stays with its owner.
Marital property, meaning most assets and debts either spouse acquired between the date of marriage and the date of final separation, regardless of whose name is on the title. Retirement accounts, real estate, and vehicles bought during the marriage all count.
Hybrid property, meaning an asset that started as separate but gained marital value over time. A house one spouse owned before the wedding that appreciated during the marriage because of joint mortgage payments or renovations is the classic example.¹⁰

After classification, the court weighs a long list of factors to decide the split, including the length of the marriage, each spouse’s monetary and nonmonetary contributions, the reasons for the divorce, the debts and liabilities of each spouse, and the tax consequences of transferring particular assets.¹⁰ Build a thorough inventory. Hiding or undervaluing assets tends to come apart under discovery.

Retirement Accounts and QDROs

Retirement benefits earned during the marriage are marital property, even if only one spouse’s name is on the account. Dividing 401(k)s, pensions, and other plans governed by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act requires a Qualified Domestic Relations Order (QDRO), a special court order directing the plan administrator to pay part of the participant’s benefits to the other spouse. Without a valid QDRO, the plan cannot legally distribute benefits to anyone other than the account holder, no matter what the divorce decree says.¹¹

A QDRO transfer does not trigger income tax or the 10% early withdrawal penalty. If the receiving spouse takes a cash distribution rather than rolling the funds into their own retirement account, they owe income tax on the amount, but the early withdrawal penalty is still waived. IRAs are simpler: they can be divided under the decree or separation agreement without a QDRO, and transfers between spouses’ IRAs incident to divorce are tax-free. Get the QDRO drafted, submitted to the plan, and approved before the divorce is finalized. Cleaning it up later is painful.

Decide Custody and Child Support

Virginia courts award custody based on the best interests of the child, and the statute lists ten factors the judge must consider. Among the most significant: the relationship between each parent and the child, each parent’s willingness to support the child’s relationship with the other parent, the child’s own preference if old enough to express one, and any history of family abuse.¹² There is no automatic preference for mothers or fathers.

Custody comes in two forms. Legal custody is the authority to make major decisions about education, healthcare, and religion. Physical custody determines where the child lives day to day. Either form can be awarded jointly or solely, and shared legal custody with one parent having primary physical custody is a common arrangement.

Child support runs on Virginia’s statutory guidelines. The calculation starts with both parents’ combined monthly gross income and factors in the number of children, health insurance premiums, and childcare costs.¹³ The guideline number is presumed correct. A judge can deviate from it only with written findings explaining why the guideline amount would be unjust or inappropriate.

Spousal Support

Spousal support is not automatic. The court decides whether to award it, and if so how much and for how long, by weighing 13 statutory factors. The most influential tend to be the length of the marriage, the standard of living you kept together, each spouse’s income and earning capacity, and any career sacrifices one spouse made for the family.¹⁴

Fault matters here more than in most other parts of the case. The statute requires the court to consider the circumstances that caused the marriage to end, including adultery and other fault grounds.¹⁴ A spouse found to have committed adultery faces a statutory bar against receiving support unless denying it would cause a manifest injustice.

Support can be temporary, rehabilitative (meant to help a spouse become self-supporting), or permanent. Courts can also require a paying spouse to keep a life insurance policy in force naming the recipient or the children as beneficiaries, so the support obligation survives if the payer dies.⁸

The Final Hearing and Decree

When all issues are resolved, either by agreement or by litigation, the case goes to a final hearing. In an uncontested divorce, the hearing is short. The plaintiff testifies to confirm the grounds, the separation period, and that the terms of the agreement are fair and voluntary. Some Virginia circuit courts let uncontested cases proceed by deposition or affidavit rather than in-person appearance, but practices vary by court.

In a contested case, the final hearing looks like a trial: both sides put on evidence and witnesses, and the judge rules on the remaining disputes. Once the judge signs the final decree, the marriage is legally over. The decree folds in any settlement agreement and becomes the enforceable order governing property transfers, custody schedules, and support going forward.

After the Divorce Is Final

A few loose ends deserve attention right after the decree is entered.

Name Change and Personal Records

If you are changing your name, the cleanest route is to include the name change in your divorce decree. Take the decree to the Social Security Administration to update your Social Security card.¹⁵ If your decree does not specify a new name, you will need additional documentation, such as a birth certificate to revert to your maiden name. After Social Security, use the updated card to change your driver’s license, bank accounts, and passport.

Beneficiary Designations

The divorce decree does not automatically remove your ex-spouse as a beneficiary on life insurance policies, retirement accounts, or bank accounts. Review and update each one. Forgetting is one of the most common post-divorce mistakes, and it can send assets to your former spouse if something happens to you.

Health Insurance

If you have been on your spouse’s employer-sponsored health plan, divorce is a qualifying event that gives you the right to COBRA continuation coverage for up to 36 months. You pay the full premium yourself, which is usually well above the employee contribution you may be used to.¹⁶

Timing matters. You have to notify the plan administrator of the divorce within 60 days. The plan then has 14 days to send you an election notice, and you get at least 60 days to decide whether to enroll.¹⁶ Miss those windows and you lose COBRA eligibility. Divorce also opens a special enrollment period on the Health Insurance Marketplace, where subsidies may bring premiums down.

Taxes

Your marital status on December 31 controls your filing status for the entire year. If the divorce is final by then, you file as single or, if you qualify, head of household. If the divorce is still pending, the IRS treats you as married for the whole year, meaning married filing jointly or married filing separately.¹⁷

For any divorce or separation agreement finalized after December 31, 2018, alimony is neither deductible by the payer nor taxable to the recipient. Child support has never been deductible or taxable.¹⁸

The custodial parent, generally the parent with whom the child spends more nights, claims the child tax credit by default. To let the noncustodial parent claim it, the custodial parent signs IRS Form 8332, which releases the claim for one year, multiple years, or all future years. The noncustodial parent attaches the signed form to their return each year they take the credit.¹⁹ Allocating the credit to the higher-earning parent can produce a larger overall tax benefit, which makes it worth discussing during settlement talks.

1
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-97 – Domicile and Residential Requirements for Suits for Annulment, Affirmance, or Divorce
2
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-91 – Grounds for Divorce from Bond of Matrimony
3
VaLegalAid.org. No Fault Divorce Self-Help Brochure
4
Virginia Judicial System Court Self-Help. Divorce
5
Virginia’s Judicial System. Circuit Court Fee Schedule – Appendix C
6
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 8.01-296 – Manner of Serving Process upon Natural Persons
7
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 50 USC 3931 – Protection of Servicemembers Against Default Judgments
8
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-103 – Court May Make Orders Pending Suit for Divorce, Custody or Visitation
9
Virginia Court System. Parent Education
10
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-107.3 – Court May Decree as to Property and Debts of the Parties
11
U.S. Department of Labor. Qualified Domestic Relations Orders Under ERISA – A Practical Guide to Dividing Retirement Benefits
12
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-124.3 – Best Interests of the Child; Visitation
13
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-108.2 – Child Support Guidelines
14
Virginia Code Commission. Code of Virginia 20-107.1 – Court May Decree as to Maintenance and Support of Spouses
15
Social Security Administration. Evidence Required to Process a Name Change on the SSN Based on Divorce, Dissolution, or Annulment
16
U.S. Department of Labor. FAQs on COBRA Continuation Health Coverage for Workers
17
Internal Revenue Service. Publication 504 (2025), Divorced or Separated Individuals
18
Internal Revenue Service. Topic No. 452, Alimony and Separate Maintenance
19
Internal Revenue Service. Form 8332 – Release/Revocation of Release of Claim to Exemption for Child by Custodial Parent