Divorce and Family Cases in Missoula County Courts, 2015 to 2025

What this means for families in Missoula County

• A domestic relations count is not a divorce count. In Montana's court system, domestic relations covers dissolution of marriage, legal separation, parenting plans, custody, grandparent visitation and other family matters, and the yearly tables count reopened cases as well as new ones. The 1,140 cases in 2025 describe the court's family docket, not 1,140 divorces.
• Fewer filings per resident, not more. Missoula County grew from 114,490 residents in 2016 to 123,513 in 2025 while its domestic relations filings fell, so the rate dropped from 12.3 to 9.2 per 1,000 residents.
• Family cases come back. A case is reopened when someone files after the judgment, for example to change a parenting plan or support order, and each reopening appears in these counts. Our guide to changing a custody order in Montana explains how that works.
• A contested case takes time. Montana's district courts aim to close family cases within 270 days; of the 9,930 family cases they closed in 2025, 77% met that standard. If you and your spouse can still talk, Cooperative Family Law lets you work out the terms together with one neutral firm instead of a court fight.
• Outside Missoula, filings rose in 2025: Ravalli County logged 354 domestic relations cases (up 9% from 324) and Lake County 187 (up 12% from 167). See our pages for Hamilton and Ravalli County and Lake County.

Missoula County District Court: family cases by year

New and reopened cases filed in the calendar year. Rates use Census Bureau population estimates for July 1 of the same year.

Domestic relations cases by county, 2024 and 2025

Missoula, Ravalli and Lake counties, the six other Montana counties with the most domestic relations filings, and the state.

Butte-Silver Bow is the Census Bureau's Silver Bow County. Share = domestic relations cases as a percentage of all new and reopened cases in that county's district court.

Domestic relations cases by year: Missoula, Ravalli and Lake counties and Montana

New and reopened domestic relations cases in each county's district court.

How we did this

We transcribed the Montana Judicial Branch's yearly tables of district court "New Case Filings and Reopened Cases", one PDF per year from 2015 to 2025, into one data file. A script checks every row: the 12 case types add up to the row total, the counties in each judicial district add up to the printed district subtotal, and all 56 counties add up to the printed statewide total. In the 2024 file the text of 13 small-county rows comes out scrambled; none of the counties on this page is among them, and the 2024 statewide figure is the file's printed total.

Domestic relations is one of the court's case types; adoption and paternity are separate case types, shown in the Missoula table. Rates per 1,000 residents use Census Bureau population estimates for July 1 of each year: the Vintage 2025 county estimates for 2020 to 2025 and the 2010 to 2020 intercensal estimates for 2015 to 2019.

The 77% figure is from the Judicial Branch's statewide case processing report for January to December 2025, which counts family cases (adoption, domestic relations and paternity) closed within the courts' 270-day time standard. It covers all Montana district courts; the report does not break it out by county.

A second, separate script re-checks the headline figures against a different publication: the Judicial Branch's 2025 District Court Case Filing Review, which reports filings by judicial district for 2016 to 2025. Missoula County shares the 4th Judicial District with Mineral County, so the check compares the two counties' combined domestic relations filings for every year, and the statewide totals.

Limits

• Domestic relations is broader than divorce. The tables do not split dissolutions from parenting, custody, separation or other family cases.
• Reopened cases are counted with new ones, so a single family's case can appear in more than one year.
• Filings say nothing about outcomes: how many cases settled by agreement, went to trial or were dismissed.
• The tables are yearly totals. They do not show the month a case was filed, so they cannot show seasonal patterns such as a January rise.
• A case is counted in the county where it was filed, which is usually but not always where the family lives.
• Paternity counts are small (Missoula County: 6 in 2025), and the court's other family case type, adoption, is shown for reference (47 in 2025).
• The Census Bureau's population series changes in 2020 (intercensal estimates before, Vintage 2025 estimates after), so small differences in rates across 2019 and 2020 should not be read as trends.