Home › DUI court assessments in California

DUI court assessments: how California's add-on penalties rebuild the fine you thought you were paying

Ask what a first California DUI fine costs and the statute answers $390 to $1,000 under Vehicle Code section 23152 — the range priced in our California breakdown. Ask what a convicted driver actually pays on that fine and the answer lives in a different set of statutes entirely: the penalty assessments and flat assessments that California layers onto every criminal fine by formula. This page prices that layer from the Penal Code, the Government Code and the Judicial Council's own revenue distribution guides, and works the arithmetic openly on the $390 minimum base fine so every figure can be re-derived.

The per-ten-dollar engine: section 1464 and its companions

California's fine inflation is mostly proportional, assessed in units of ten dollars of base fine. Penal Code section 1464 imposes a state penalty of $10 for every $10 of fine — a sum that, by itself, doubles the base fine. Penal Code section 1465.7 adds a state surcharge of 20 percent of the base fine. Government Code section 76000 adds a county penalty of $7 for every $10. Government Code section 76000.5 adds $2 for every $10 for emergency medical services. Government Code section 70372 adds $5 for every $10 for the state court facilities construction fund. The DNA identification fund penalties in Government Code sections 76104.6 and 76104.7 add $1 and $3 for every $10 respectively, and Government Code section 76000.10 adds a further $1 for every $10 for emergency medical air transportation in counties that have adopted it. The Judicial Council's Trial Court Revenue Distribution Guidelines — the document California courts themselves use to split the money — summarise the standard stack as $29 of penalty assessments for every $10 of base fine where the air transportation penalty applies, $28 where it does not. None of these lines appears in the Vehicle Code, none is discretionary in amount, and together they are why a California DUI judgment's fine line and its balance-due line are different numbers.

The two flat assessments that ride on every conviction

On top of the proportional stack sit two flat charges that do not scale with the fine at all. Government Code section 70373 imposes a criminal conviction assessment of $30 for each misdemeanor or felony conviction — $35 for an infraction — to fund court facilities. Penal Code section 1465.8 imposes a court operations assessment of $40 on every conviction for a criminal offence, including a traffic offence, other than parking offences. A DUI defendant convicted on a single count pays both, $70 in flat assessments, whatever the court sets the base fine at; a defendant convicted on multiple counts pays the section 1465.8 assessment per count as the statute directs. The Judicial Council's distribution guides treat both assessments as outside the penalty-assessment calculation — they are added after the per-ten-dollar stack, not fed into it — and the restitution fine priced on our restitution page, $150 to $1,000 for a misdemeanor under Penal Code section 1202.4(b), is a separate line again, payable to the state Restitution Fund and not part of the fine at all.

A worked example on the minimum base fine, with the arithmetic shown

Take the lowest first-offence outcome the Vehicle Code allows: a $390 base fine. The fine contains thirty-nine ten-dollar units. Applying the standard $29-per-$10 stack the Judicial Council describes — the version including the $1 air transportation penalty — produces $1,131 of penalty assessments. Add the two flat assessments, $30 and $40, and the fine-side balance reaches $390 + $1,131 + $70 = $1,591, before the restitution fine adds its $150 statutory minimum, bringing the court-ordered monetary floor on that minimum-fine judgment to $1,741, and before any county-adopted additions, any probation or programme components, or the DMV side of the case. In a county that has not adopted the air transportation penalty the stack is $28 per $10, the assessments total $1,092, and the same computation lands $39 lower. Every number in this paragraph is arithmetic on the statutory rates tabled above, shown so it can be checked — it is not a quoted "average DUI cost," and at the $1,000 maximum base fine the same formulas produce proportionally larger figures by the same method: one hundred units, $2,900 of assessments at the $29 rate, plus the same $70 flat, plus a restitution fine the court sets within its $150 to $1,000 band.

Why this layer is invisible until judgment

Three features of the system explain why defendants are surprised by it. First, plea discussions and most attorney summaries quote the base fine range from the Vehicle Code, because that is the only part of the fine the judge has discretion over; the assessments follow by formula and are rarely itemised until the court's minute order prints them. Second, the assessments are not themselves subject to the add-ons — section 70373 states expressly that the penalty chapters and the section 1465.7 surcharge do not apply to the conviction assessment — so the stack is finite and computable in advance, which is the entire premise of this page. Third, inability-to-pay law has changed how the stack is collected rather than how it is computed: California courts must consider a defendant's ability to pay before imposing some of these lines, and fines and assessments can be challenged on that basis at sentencing, but the published rates themselves are the ones tabled here. A driver who wants the exact composition of a real judgment should ask the court for the distribution breakdown the Judicial Council's guidelines govern — the same document this page's rates are drawn from — rather than accepting any single-line summary, including ours.

Sources: California Penal Code §§ 1464, 1465.7, 1465.8, 1202.4; California Government Code §§ 70372, 70373, 76000, 76000.5, 76000.10, 76104.6, 76104.7; Judicial Council of California, Trial Court Revenue Distribution Guidelines. Last verified: November 2026.

The honest boundary of this page

These rates are California's general criminal fine machinery applied to a DUI conviction; they are not a DUI-specific fee schedule, and other states build the same result differently — Texas through its consolidated court cost, Florida through its clerk's service charges — which is why this site prices each state's machinery on that state's pages instead of inventing a national court-cost figure. County-adopted penalties beyond the ones tabled, night-court and similar local assessments, and the cost of the alcohol programme the sentence imposes are separate components; where a figure is set locally rather than by the statutes above, this page describes it and does not price it.

Sources: California Penal Code §§ 1464, 1465.7, 1465.8; California Government Code §§ 70372, 70373, 76000 et seq.; Judicial Council Trial Court Revenue Distribution Guidelines. Last verified: November 2026. This page is educational information about costs only — not legal advice. Laws and fees change; confirm current figures with your court and your state's driver-licensing agency.