What this compares
Each tab is a claim value — the amount of money in dispute. Each row is one country’s indicative lawyer fee for a standard first-instance civil money claim, taken from the official tariff that bar council or ministry publishes and that Tarifo’s per-country calculator uses. The fee is computed in the country’s own currency and then converted to euros at a single reference rate so the countries rank cleanly within each tab; the national amount each figure was computed in is shown on the focused court-fee comparison.
How to read it
These are reference values, not quotes or binding minimums. In most of these jurisdictions the tariff stopped being a mandatory floor years ago — what a client actually pays is agreed with the lawyer and can be higher or lower. The numbers are useful for the same reason a price index is: they show the shape of the cost across borders.
Two things make a clean comparison hard, and Tarifo does not hide them. First, “a civil money claim” is not the identical procedural object in every country — each row notes the exact case type and the article behind it. Second, the fee scales themselves differ in kind: some are smooth percentages of the claim, some are stepped tariffs, and a few add fixed per-stage components. That is precisely why stepping through the tabs from €5,000 to €100,000 looks different from one country to the next.
Czechia and Slovakia are not shown here. Their lawyer fee is billed per procedural act (a per-step tariff), not as a single function of the claim value, so a “fee for a claim of €X” figure would be misleading without specifying the acts performed. Their court fees, which are value-based, appear in the court-fee comparisons.
Where the numbers come from
Every fee traces to the cited article in the official tariff. For the full method behind a country’s number — the scale, the rounding, the VAT treatment, and any known divergences — open that country’s methodology page from its calculator. If you want the court’s own filing fee rather than the lawyer’s fee, see the companion court-fees comparison.