Riverside County Family Law by the Numbers: Filings by Year From the Judicial Council’s Court Statistics Report

Family filings by fiscal year, Riverside County Superior Court. Each row is read from the report and page shown:

In every row from 2019-20 on, the five type columns add up to the total (checked by the page author). The 2019 and 2020 reports use an older layout with one column for marital filings and one for all other petitions, so those two rows cannot be split by type. The report prints no “incomplete data” flag on Riverside’s filings cells in these tables^12345678.

The 2026 report’s glossary defines the case types¹:

• Marital: proceedings in which a petition has been filed for dissolution or voiding of a marriage or for legal separation. The table’s column key adds nullity: “(B) Includes dissolution, legal separation, and nullity”¹.
• Parentage: a petition (form FL-200) under the Uniform Parentage Act to establish a parental relationship; surrogacy petitions are captured here too¹.
• Domestic violence: a case based on a Request for Domestic Violence Restraining Order (form DV-100)¹.
• Child support: the glossary’s matching category is a child support matter where the Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) is a party, for example through a complaint on form FL-600¹.
• Other petitions: family law cases other than marital, parentage, domestic violence and DCSS reimbursement petitions¹.

Good to know These are filings: cases opened in a year, counted once. A marital filing is not a divorce granted, and the report does not publish how many judgments were entered. Anyone quoting “divorces in Riverside County” from this table is quoting petitions for divorce, legal separation and nullity together.

These are the page author’s calculations from the table above:

• Total family filings in Riverside rose from 19,387 in 2020-21 to 22,145 in 2024-25, an increase of 2,758 (about 14 percent). The increase from 2023-24 to 2024-25 was 217 (about 1.0 percent)¹²⁵.
• Marital filings stayed between 7,155 and 7,813 from 2019-20 to 2024-25. They were 7,695 in 2024-25¹²³⁴⁵⁶.
• Parentage filings rose from 1,606 in 2020-21 to 2,151 in 2024-25¹⁵.
• Domestic violence filings were 5,781 in 2024-25, down from 5,896 in 2023-24 and above the 5,669 of 2019-20¹²⁶.
• Statewide family filings fell from 318,729 in 2023-24 to 310,579 in 2024-25, while Riverside’s rose¹².

Riverside’s share of the statewide total in 2024-25 was 7.1 percent overall; by type it was 7.2 percent of marital, 10.2 percent of parentage, 7.5 percent of domestic violence, 6.2 percent of child support and 6.2 percent of other petitions, against statewide counts of 107,146, 21,060, 77,444, 69,831 and 35,098¹.

The court’s own Fast Facts sheet, which reports fiscal year 2024-25, gives 331,680 filings of all types including 22,145 family law, 66,171 civil and 183,029 infractions⁹. That puts family law at about 6.7 percent of the court’s filings (page author’s calculation). The sheet is edited in place and carries no date of its own.

• Divorces granted. The tables read for this page count filings and dispositions; none is labeled as a count of divorces granted or judgments entered¹.
• Dispositions without a caveat. For 2024-25 the report shows Riverside’s total family dispositions as 19,757, flagged “(i)” for incomplete data, as are its other-petition dispositions; for 2023-24 the total is 16,347, also flagged¹². The report’s introduction says incomplete data “generally causes downward shifts in the number of filings and dispositions” (PDF p. 14)¹.
• Time to disposition for family cases. The report’s time-to-disposition sections cover civil and criminal cases, and its family sections cover filings, dispositions and caseload clearance rates¹. No Riverside family processing time is published there; see how long a divorce takes in Riverside County.
• Anything by courthouse or by whether a party has an attorney. The table is one line per county¹.
• Which judicial officers hear family law. Table 14a shows Riverside with 89.0 authorized judicial positions in 2024-25, 75 judges and 14.0 commissioners, and 100.7 judicial position equivalents, for all case types¹.