Family · Divorce Residency
How Long You Must Live in a State Before Filing for Divorce
The residency you need to file for divorce in each state, whether a county period also applies, whether one spouse is enough, and how it differs from the wait to finalize. Each cited to the statute.
Read this first: file residency, and sometimes a county too
Before a court can hear your divorce, you or your spouse usually must have lived in the state for a set time. Most of these states require six months, Illinois only 90 days, and New York uses a tiered rule of one or two years. Only one spouse normally has to qualify, so you can often file even if your spouse has moved away.
Two nuances matter. California and Texas add a separate, shorter county requirement (three months and 90 days), and filing in the wrong county is a venue defect. And filing residency is not the wait to finalize: separation periods and cooling-off clocks are different and often longer. Every figure links to the statute, and pages still pending verification say so.
Every state in one table
The state residency, any county requirement, and the statute in each row.
All states (10)
| State | Residency | Statute |
|---|---|---|
| California | 6 mo state + 3 mo county | Cal. Fam. Code §2320 |
| Florida | 6 months | Fla. Stat. §61.021 |
| Georgia | 6 months | O.C.G.A. §19‑5‑2 |
| Illinois | 90 days | 750 ILCS 5/401(a) |
| Michigan | 180 days + 10-day county | Mich. Comp. Laws §552.9(1) |
| New York | 1 or 2 years | N.Y. Dom. Rel. Law §230 |
| North Carolina | 6 months, no county | N.C. Gen. Stat. §50‑6 |
| Ohio | 6 mo state + 90 day county | Ohio Rev. Code §3105.03 |
| Pennsylvania | 6 months | 23 Pa.C.S. §3104(b) |
| Texas | 6 mo state + 90 day county | Tex. Fam. Code §6.301 |
What these pages are, and what they aren't
Each state page is a reference for the residency needed to file for divorce and the neutral steps to confirm it. They are deliberately not advice for your case: domicile, county venue, military service, and the separate wait to finalize can all change the answer, so each page links to the statute and a court self-help or attorney resource. This is legal information, not legal advice.