A trading name that differs from a business's legal name is recorded, for most of the businesses that need one, by a county clerk. Not by the state. That single structural point is why asking what a DBA costs in Dallas Fort Worth produces no usable answer: a county record is priced by the county holding it, and the metroplex is made of counties whose clerks publish separate schedules and consult nobody before revising them.
This page is arranged by how firmly each part of the subject is established rather than by the order of the forms. The fees come first, because they were read on each clerk's own page on the day this was published. Then the procedural material, read once during the research behind these pages. Then two figures in wide circulation that appear on neither schedule. Then the questions no page consulted here answers at all. That ordering is forced by the subject: the most searched fact about this filing is also the one where the record and the summaries of the record disagree.
Read again on the day of publication
The Dallas County Clerk states the charge in one line on its own procedures page: The filing fee is $23.00 and .50 for each additional partner (owner) after the first.
A second line adds a condition rather than a product: Add a $2.00 Acknowledgement fee if the deputy takes the acknowledgment instead of a notary.
So the Dallas total for a sole owner is $23.00 where the signature has already been notarized and $25.00 where the counter handles it.
The Tarrant County Clerk publishes its charges as a schedule rather than as a sentence, and the two relevant lines read One Owner: $20
and Each Additional Owner: $.50
. There is no acknowledgment line. There is instead a surcharge that Dallas does not impose: card payment at Tarrant carries a 3 percent processing charge, on Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.
Three dollars is nothing as money and a great deal as evidence. Two clerks sharing a border, a labor market and an airport arrived at different base prices for an identical filing, and each publishes its own without reference to the other. What that establishes is not that Tarrant is cheaper. It is that the number is a local variable, so the practice of quoting a regional figure has no foundation, and neither of these two figures predicts what a third clerk charges.
Read once, and the part most guidance still gets wrong
Which office receives the certificate depends on what the filer is, and the rule changed seven years ago. The Tarrant County Clerk sets out both halves. Its general instruction is that An Assumed Name / DBA (Doing Business as) should be filed with the County Clerk's Office in which business is to be conducted.
Its dated exception, which the page attributes to HB 3609 - 86th Legislation
, is that from September 1, 2019 incorporated entities, corporations and limited partnerships and limited liability companies among them, lodge their assumed name certificates with the Texas Secretary of State instead.
The consequence is a split that runs against intuition. An unincorporated operator, the party least likely to have professional help, files locally and pays a local price. A limited liability company, having already dealt with Austin once, deals with Austin again: on the Secretary of State's own fee schedule the assumed name certificate is Form 503 at $25 and the abandonment of one is Form 504 at $10, neither figure varying by county because neither is a county matter. Guidance predating the change, and there is a lot of it still in circulation, sends incorporated filers to a county counter that no longer wants them.
Note also what the county instruction attaches to. The obligation follows where business is conducted, which for a firm operating on both sides of a line is not a single place. Nothing on either page consulted addresses how a business trading in several counties should treat that, so this publication does not answer it either, beyond observing that the filing attaches to the activity rather than to a head office and that the two clerks involved would each be applying their own schedule.
What each counter expects when the paper arrives
Dallas County publishes two routes with different proof requirements. A filing sent by mail must include a notarized copy of the assumed name form. A filing made in person requires that all owners be present with valid government issued identification for the form to be recorded, which is a meaningful constraint on a partnership whose owners are not in the same city. The Recording Division sits at 500 Elm Street, Suite 2100, Dallas, and the page gives its hours as 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday to Friday, and its number as (214) 653-7099.
Tarrant County's schedule prices the things a filer needs afterward, which Dallas's procedures page does not. A copy of an assumed name certificate is $6 each. A search by name is $10. Plain copies of assumed names are $1 each, with $5 added for certification. Those are the charges that arrive later, when a bank or a counterparty asks for proof rather than for the original act, and they are worth reading before the filing rather than after it. The clerk's office is in the Tarrant County Plaza Building at 200 Taylor Street, Fort Worth, on the third floor.
In circulation, and on no schedule
Two figures for these two counties travel widely and belong on neither page. A search engine summary of the Dallas County site reported the filing fee as $24.00. A summary of the Tarrant County site reported $71. Both county pages were opened again on 26 August 2026, immediately before this article was published, precisely because a figure that specific and that contested should not be reprinted on trust. The authority values held exactly: $23.00 and the fifty cent increment at Dallas, $20 for a single owner and the same increment at Tarrant, with the acknowledgment charge and the card surcharge intact.
The $71 is the more instructive of the two, because it matches no line on the Tarrant schedule and looks like several unrelated charges added together. That is how a wrong number usually gets made: not invented, but assembled out of real lines that were never meant to be summed. The $24.00 is a different failure, a plausible near miss on a real fee, and the kind that survives longest because nobody has cause to doubt it. If a figure you have been quoted for either county is not one of the ones printed above, it did not come from the clerk, and the clerk is the only body entitled to set it.
What no page consulted here states
Three things a reader would reasonably want are missing, and each is missing because nobody consulted for this article published it. The first is the governing statute. The Tarrant County page refers to the Texas Business and Commerce Code and stops there, narrowing it to no numbered provision, and the Secretary of State's fee schedule cites nothing at all, so no citation appears here.
The second is how long a certificate lasts. Assumed name certificates are generally understood to expire, and no page read for this article states a term, so this publication states none. An operator who needs to know when a certificate lapses has to ask the office holding it.
The third is the price everywhere other than Dallas and Tarrant. Denton, Collin, Rockwall, Ellis, Johnson, Parker and Kaufman county clerks each publish their own recording charges, and none of those schedules was read for this article. Given that two adjacent clerks differ, the only defensible course is to open the schedule for the county where the business is actually conducted. The wider set of filings a new company faces, and the offices holding each of them, is laid out in the guide to what a new business owes and to whom, and what the certificate of formation itself does and does not buy is worked through in the account of a single $300 line on the state fee schedule.
One closing observation about the shape of all this. The assumed name certificate is the only record in the sequence that is priced by geography, and it is priced by geography because it follows the business rather than the owner. Almost everything else a company deals with is either statewide or federal and therefore identical in Amarillo and in Arlington. The obligations that arrive the first time a company pays somebody split the other way again, statewide for the tax and local for the service, which is set out in the section on hiring and the bodies that handle it. The rest of what this publication covers is indexed on the front page of this review.