SR-22 filings in Harris County, Texas

Almost everyone arrives here with one document — a court order, or a letter from the DPS — and assumes it is the whole list. It usually is not. One case can produce more than one enforcement action, each with its own fee and its own clearance step: a conviction and an Administrative License Revocation are separate events, and a driver who clears one and drives away has cleared half of it.

The DPS License Eligibility system lists what is actually attached to your license. Check it before you budget anything, and before you assume you need a court petition at all — if the only thing between you and an ordinary reinstatement is proof of insurance and a fee, a petition is a filing fee you would not get back.

One thing not to act on: any advice about Texas surcharges is obsolete. The Driver Responsibility Program and every surcharge under it were repealed on 1 September 2019, and plenty of pages still tell Harris County drivers to budget for them.

This is where Harris County stops being generic. The petition goes to the court that ordered the suspension, so the county is the unit that varies — and this county does not have one counter for it. Which desk is yours is decided by how your license was suspended, not by which building is closest.

Harris County Criminal Courts at Law 1201 Franklin Street, Houston 77002

Sixteen courts at the Criminal Justice Center. A county criminal case — and the suspension that followed it — was heard by one of them, and their rules of court route occupational-license petitions in writing.

Harris County District Clerk 1201 Franklin Street, Houston 77002

Accepts petitions arising from the suspensions the criminal courts’ rules expressly cover, and requires its own case information sheet with every original petition.

Harris County Clerk

Takes the petitions the district clerk sends across, and says plainly that it supplies no petition form — the petitioner prepares one or retains counsel.

Harris County Justice Courts

Accept a petition only where the suspension came from something other than a physical or mental disability or a DWI conviction.

8 justice precincts, 2 places in each. Eight precincts, two places in each — sixteen justice courts, and which one is yours is decided by where you live rather than by preference.

Harris County does not have one occupational-license counter. The criminal courts’ rules send petitions arising from the suspensions they cover to the District Clerk and everybody else to the County Clerk; the justice courts take a third set and refuse DWI suspensions outright. Swap the county name into that sentence and it stops being true, which is the test this page had to pass before it was written.

We are an insurance agency, not a law firm. The petition, the clerk and the hearing are yours and your attorney’s; the certificate is the one item on the court’s list that no clerk produces, and it is ours. The full Harris checklist — documents, hour limits, what the order does and does not authorise — is in our Harris County occupational license guide.

Sources: Harris County Criminal Courts at Law — rules of court; Harris County Clerk — occupational and restricted licenses; Harris County Justice Courts — occupational driver’s license information. Verified 10 August 2026.

Harris County is not one rating territory. A car kept in Baytown, one in Cypress and one inside the Loop are three different exposures to a carrier — claim frequency, theft, repair cost and litigation patterns all move across the county — and the same driver with the same record can be priced differently at each. The anchors below are places already named on this site, so you can see the spread without us pretending to know its size.

• 77002 Downtown Houston — the Criminal Justice Center
• 77034 Southeast Houston — our office on FM 1959
• 77043 Spring Branch
• 77071 Southwest Houston — the Gessner Mega Center
• 77373 Spring
• 77429 Cypress
• 77506 Pasadena
• 77521 Baytown
• 77587 South Houston

Those are anchors, not a price list. Each carrier files its own rating plan with the Texas Department of Insurance and sets its own territories inside them, so the spread between two Harris addresses is real, it is different at every company, and it is not ours to publish as a table. What an independent agency can do is put the same driver, the same vehicle and the same limits in front of several of those plans and read back what actually comes out.

Sources: USPS — ZIP Code lookup; Texas Department of Insurance — how auto and homeowners costs are calculated. Verified 17 August 2026.