Pflugerville Divorce Lawyer | Travis County or Williamson County, Depending on Your Address
Pflugerville sits in two counties. Some addresses file in Travis County, others in Williamson, and the two run family cases under different rules. SMB Law, PC handles divorce, custody, and support for Pflugerville families in both.
Serving Pflugerville Families in Travis County
Pflugerville has become one of the most diverse and family-friendly suburbs in the Austin area, and we help households across neighborhoods like Blackhawk, Falcon Pointe, Avalon, and Highland Park. Weekends here often revolve around Lake Pflugerville, Typhoon Texas, and Stone Hill Town Center, and most local families have children in Pflugerville ISD, which shapes the custody and scheduling questions we handle every day. Pflugerville cases are handled by the same team behind our Austin divorce practice.
Pflugerville sits in Travis County, so divorces here are filed and heard in the Travis County family courts at the Heman Marion Sweatt Courthouse in downtown Austin, only a few blocks from our office on San Antonio Street. That is a short 16 mile trip down I-35 or SH-130, roughly 20 to 25 minutes, and video consultations are always available. Call (512) 561-5003 to talk with a Pflugerville divorce lawyer.
What Our Clients Say
Key Takeaway
- Pflugerville straddles the Travis and Williamson county line. Your address decides where the case is filed, whether that is the Travis County Courthouse in downtown Austin or the Williamson County Justice Center in Georgetown. Our Pflugerville divorce lawyer handles both.
- Both counties impose a standing order the day you file. It binds both spouses automatically, covers accounts, property, insurance, and the children, and is enforceable by contempt. Neither county waits for you to ask for it, and both apply to child support and custody issues alike.
- Here is where the counties split. The Travis County standing order expressly applies to modifications. The Williamson County order expressly does not. Same city, same street in some cases, opposite answer on whether you are protected the day you file to change an existing order.
Which County Is Your Pflugerville Divorce In?
This is the first question to settle, and Pflugerville is one of the few Central Texas cities where the answer is not obvious. The city sits across the Travis and Williamson county line, and it contracts with both counties for elections because its residents genuinely live in both. Your address decides your courthouse.
If your address is in Travis County, the case is filed with the Travis County District Clerk’s Family Division at 1700 Guadalupe Street, 3rd Floor, Austin, Texas 78701. If it is in Williamson County, it goes to the Williamson County District Clerk and is heard at the Justice Center, 405 M.L.K. Street, Georgetown. Those are opposite directions from Pflugerville.
The filing fee is $350 in either county, and it is the same with children or without. Residency is the same too: six months in Texas and ninety days in the county where you file.
What is not the same is how the two counties handle a case once it is open, and that difference is the substance of this page. If you want the statewide picture, our Texas divorce law overview covers it.
The Standing Order in Each County
Both counties impose a standing order the day the petition is filed. Nobody asks a judge for it, it binds both spouses automatically, and it is enforceable by contempt. Both orders stop the same core conduct: draining accounts, selling or hiding property, canceling health or auto insurance, running up joint debt, harassing the other spouse, disparaging the other parent in front of the children, and removing the children from the State of Texas.
Read that last one carefully. It is the state line, not a county line. Pflugerville parents routinely misread it as a ban on driving into Austin or up to Georgetown.
The Williamson County order also expressly bars tracking or monitoring the other spouse, which reaches phone location sharing, a GPS unit on a vehicle, and monitoring software on a shared computer. Plenty of couples share a family location app for years without a thought. It becomes a violation the day the case is filed.
One procedural difference matters at the counter. In Williamson County, a represented party’s petition gets rejected if a copy of the standing order is not attached. Our Pflugerville divorce lawyer attaches it as a matter of routine on that side of the line, which is one less week lost to a bounced filing.
The Modification Gap Between the Two Counties
This is the single most useful thing to know about a Pflugerville family case, and almost no firm page mentions it.
The Travis County standing order expressly applies to modifications. File to change an existing custody or support order on the Travis side of Pflugerville and the same automatic protections attach the day you file.
The Williamson County standing order expressly does not. File the identical modification on the Williamson side and nothing attaches. No automatic restraint on accounts, on property, on the children leaving the state, on anything. If you want protection during a Williamson County modification, it has to be requested and granted.
Two neighbors in Pflugerville can file the same suit on the same day and be in completely different positions the following morning. We check which county a client is in before anything else, because that answer changes what the first week of the case looks like. Our modification page covers the standards under section 156.101 in more depth, and our uncontested divorce page covers what qualifies as agreed.
Equity Compensation and Retirement Accounts
Pflugerville sits in the middle of the tech corridor. Between the Dell campus in Round Rock, the Samsung plant up in Taylor, and the Austin employers reachable on SH 130 and 45, a large share of the households here hold compensation that does not look like a paycheck.
Equity compensation is where these cases get technical. Restricted stock units, options, and deferred comp granted during the marriage but vesting after it are neither purely community nor purely separate. Texas apportions them based on when the work that earned them was performed, which means the grant documents and vesting schedules matter far more than the account balance on the day someone filed.
Retirement accounts split by a qualified domestic relations order, a separate order the plan administrator must approve. A decree that divides a 401(k) but is never followed by a QDRO leaves the money right where it was. In a high-asset divorce we chase those documents early, because reconstructing a vesting history two years after the decree is expensive and sometimes impossible.
Military Divorce
A military divorce runs on federal law layered over Texas law, and the layers matter. The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, at 50 U.S.C. sections 3931 and 3932, lets a deployed servicemember get a case stayed rather than defaulted, which changes the timeline on both sides.
Retired pay is divided under the Uniformed Services Former Spouses Protection Act at 10 U.S.C. section 1408, and the separate ten-year overlap rule governs only whether the finance center pays a former spouse directly. It does not decide whether the spouse is entitled to a share. Those two things get confused constantly.
Deployment and PCS orders also complicate child custody, and Texas Family Code sections 153.701 through 153.709 govern what happens to possession while a parent is deployed. We build orders that survive a set of orders arriving with sixty days notice.
LGBTQ Divorce
Couples who were together for years before they could legally marry face a question most divorces never raise: when did the community estate start? Texas measures community property from the date of marriage, which for many couples is far later than the date they bought a house together or opened a joint account. That gap can be the largest issue in the case.
Parentage is the other recurring problem. Where only one partner is the biological or adoptive parent, the other’s standing has to be established rather than assumed, and doing that before a dispute arises is dramatically easier than doing it afterward. Our LGBTQ divorce attorneys handle both issues, along with the ordinary custody, support, and property questions every case brings.
Key Issues Our Lawyer Handled in Your Pflugerville Divorce Case
Texas separates two things most people lump together as custody. Conservatorship is the decision rights over school, medical care, and psychiatric treatment. Possession and access is the calendar. A parent can share full decision-making and still hold the smaller share of overnights, and those two questions get decided independently of each other.
Texas Family Code section 153.131(b) starts every case with a presumption that the parents should be joint managing conservators. That presumption can be rebutted, but the parent asking a judge to depart from it carries the burden of proof, not the other way around.
Texas is also a community property state, which means the court divides the community estate in a manner it finds just and right. That is not the same as an automatic even split, and it is not the same as dividing everything either. Property that traces to an inheritance, a gift, or something owned before the marriage stays separate, but proving it takes clear and convincing evidence rather than recollection.
The House, the Retirement Accounts, and the Debt
The house is usually the biggest item. If one spouse keeps a home in Falcon Pointe, Blackhawk, or Stone Hill, the other typically comes off the mortgage through a refinance and gets bought out of the equity, often with an owelty lien securing that payment. That step gets skipped more often than it should, and the spouse who moves out stays liable on a loan for a house they no longer own.
Retirement accounts divide by a qualified domestic relations order, a separate order the plan administrator has to approve. A decree that says the 401(k) is split but is never followed by a QDRO leaves the money exactly where it sat.
Debt gets divided too, and a decree does not bind a credit card company. If a joint card stays open in both names, both names stay on the hook no matter what the decree assigns. We close the accounts as part of the settlement rather than trusting the paperwork to do it.
Parenting Schedules That Survive the SH 130 Commute
The default calendar is the Standard Possession Order. Under section 153.3171, a parent living within fifty miles of the child can elect the expanded version, which converts Thursday evenings into overnights and stretches weekends from Friday after school to Monday morning. For a Pflugerville parent whose ex is in Round Rock, Hutto, Manor, or north Austin, that fifty mile line is almost always met and it is worth asking for.
A schedule that ignores how people here actually commute falls apart by October. A parent driving to the Domain or downtown leaves early and gets back late. A parent working up in Taylor has a different Thursday entirely. The default six o’clock exchange looks fine on paper and is unworkable for one of those two households.
We write orders that name the exchange point and time, account for the Pflugerville ISD calendar including early-release days, and say plainly who handles the drive. Under section 153.009, a judge in a nonjury case must interview a child twelve or older in chambers if either parent asks, and we prepare parents honestly for what that interview does and does not accomplish.
Child Support
Guideline support under section 154.125 is a percentage of the paying parent’s monthly net resources: twenty percent for one child, twenty-five for two, thirty for three, rising from there. Net resources are not take-home pay. The calculation starts from all income, then subtracts federal income tax at the single-filer rate, Social Security, union dues, and the cost of the children’s health and dental coverage.
The percentage applies only up to a statutory cap on net resources that the Texas Attorney General adjusts every six years. Income above that cap does not automatically produce more support. A parent who wants more has to prove the children’s proven needs under section 154.126, which in a tech-corridor household with bonuses and equity is a real fight worth understanding before it starts.
Support is separate from the medical and dental support ordered alongside it, and it does not cover college, club sports, or a car at sixteen. If those matter to you, they have to be negotiated into the decree.
Spousal Support / Alimony
Texas is stingier here than most states. Under Texas Family Code section 8.051, the most common route to court-ordered maintenance is a marriage of ten years or longer where the requesting spouse cannot meet minimum reasonable needs. Section 8.054 caps the duration by length of marriage: five years at ten to twenty, seven years at twenty to thirty, ten years at thirty and above.
Section 8.055 caps the monthly amount at the lesser of $5,000 or twenty percent of the paying spouse’s average monthly gross income. Clients coming out of long marriages are frequently surprised by that ceiling, and it is far better to hear it at the first meeting than after a year of litigating toward a number the statute will not allow.
Contractual alimony is a different instrument. Spouses can agree to terms a judge could not order, and in the right case that agreement is the cleaner answer. We push for a figure that fits a real budget and present the income evidence if it has to be decided by a judge.
Working With Our Pflugerville Divorce Attorneys
Shane M. Boasberg founded SMB Law, PC in Austin and has practiced Texas family law for more than twenty years. He was selected to Texas Monthly Rising Stars in 2012 and again from 2014 through 2016, and he is a member of the Austin Bar Association. He appears regularly in the family courts of both Travis and Williamson counties, which for a city split across the line is not a small thing.
Most firms practice comfortably in one of those two counties and treat the other as an away game. A Pflugerville client can end up in either. Knowing the Travis courthouse on Guadalupe and the Georgetown Justice Center equally well is the practical requirement here, not a bonus.
You Get the Attorney You Hired
At a larger firm the attorney who takes your consultation is often not the one standing up at the hearing. Shane Boasberg handles the case he is hired for from the first meeting through the final decree, and Pflugerville clients deal with him directly rather than routing questions through staff. Our divorce practice covers custody, property, support, and contested cases, and we are candid about which of those your case actually turns on. If you are weighing whether an annulment applies instead, we will tell you that too.
Getting to Whichever Courthouse Is Yours
A Travis County case runs through 1700 Guadalupe Street in downtown Austin, which from Pflugerville means I-35 or Highway 290 into the middle of town, plus paid parking and a security line. A Williamson County case runs to the Justice Center at 405 M.L.K. Street in Georgetown, straight up I-35 or SH 130, easier parking, longer drive.
Either way, being late to a docket call is not a neutral event. We tell clients where to park and where to meet before the first setting rather than leaving them to sort it out at a quarter to nine in a building they have never been in.
Straight Answers About Likely Outcomes
A lawyer who tells you everything is winnable is selling you something. We would rather say early that the schedule you want is a stretch in front of this particular judge, or that the separate-property claim on the down payment will not survive without the closing statement, than take the retainer and deliver that news in month eight. Every case gets an honest read on what the law supports, what the evidence supports, and what it costs to chase the gap between them. Then the decision is yours, including who ends up paying for the divorce.
Honest Talk About Cost
Nobody can quote you a divorce price on the first phone call, and any firm that does is guessing. The court fees are fixed at $350 plus service costs. Attorney time is not fixed, and it scales almost entirely with how much the two of you disagree.
Two Pflugerville spouses who settle the house and the parenting schedule between them spend a fraction of what two spouses who litigate every issue spend. Discovery, temporary orders, a custody evaluation, and a contested trial each add real cost. We tell you at the outset which of those your case is likely to need.
Modifications and Enforcement Later On
Section 156.101 sets the bar for changing custody or possession: a material and substantial change in circumstances plus a showing that the change serves the child’s best interest. Two timing rules trip people up. Under section 156.102, a suit filed within one year of the order to change which parent designates the child’s primary residence needs a supporting affidavit meeting specific statutory grounds. Under section 156.401, support can generally be modified after three years if the guideline amount would differ by twenty percent or one hundred dollars.
And remember the county split. On the Travis side, the standing order protects you during that modification. On the Williamson side, it does not. We also handle enforcement, including whether the other side can be made to pay fees.
Contact Our Pflugerville Divorce Law Firm
The first call is a conversation, not a commitment. Bring what you have, including your address, and our Pflugerville divorce lawyer will tell you which county you are in and what that means. Call SMB Law, PC at (512) 561-5003.
More ways we help Pflugerville families: contested divorce, uncontested divorce, child custody, car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, and wrongful death.
Pflugerville is the rare Central Texas city where the first question in a divorce is not what happened but where you live. Travis and Williamson counties charge the same $350, apply standing orders that look nearly identical at filing, and then diverge on the one point that matters most later: whether those protections follow you into a modification. Travis says yes. Williamson says no. Sorting out which side of the line your address falls on, before anything gets filed, is where we start with every Pflugerville client who calls.
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Questions Pflugerville Clients Ask Us Most
How do I find out which county my address is in?
Your property tax statement is the fastest answer. It names the appraisal district and the taxing county. Your voter registration card works too, since Pflugerville contracts with both counties to run elections and the card reflects which one you vote in. A mailing address alone does not settle it, because ZIP codes here cross the county line. If you are unsure, tell us the street address on the first call and we will confirm it before anything is filed.
Can I pick the county that suits me better?
Generally no. Texas Family Code section 6.301 requires ninety days of residence in the county where you file, so your address decides it rather than your preference. Where the spouses live in different counties, either county may work and the choice can matter. That is one of the few situations where filing first has real strategic weight. Our Pflugerville contested divorce practice covers what to do when that comes up, and our uncontested divorce page covers the simpler path.
What if my spouse refuses to sign anything?
Texas does not require both spouses to agree to a divorce. One spouse can obtain one over the other’s objection. If your spouse is served and never files an answer, the case can proceed by default once the answer deadline passes and the sixty day period has run. If they answer but stonewall, the case still moves through temporary orders, discovery, and mediation on the court’s schedule rather than theirs, and a judge decides what they would not. Refusing to participate delays a case. It does not prevent one.
Can I change my name back in the divorce?
Yes, and it is far cheaper now than later. Texas Family Code section 6.706 directs the court to restore a party’s prior name on request in the divorce itself. Ask for it in the petition and the decree carries the change, which is all the Social Security Administration, the DMV, and your bank need. Skip it and you are looking at a separate name change suit with its own filing fee and hearing. It is the item we see forgotten more often than any other in an otherwise finished decree.
Do both of us have to appear to finish an agreed divorce?
No. In an agreed case only one spouse appears for the short hearing where the judge takes testimony and signs the decree. The other signs the decree and, where appropriate, a waiver of service, and never sets foot in the courthouse. Whether that testimony can be given by written affidavit instead varies by court and judge, and it varies between Travis and Williamson as well, so we confirm what your specific court accepts before setting anything.
SMB Law, PC Practice Areas in Pflugerville
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