Clean Break Order

A Clean Break Order is a legally binding document that severs all financial ties between divorcing spouses, ensuring that neither party can make future financial claims against the other. You need one to protect your financial independence and to ensure that all financial matters are settled permanently and clearly after your divorce.

Our service for obtaining a Clean Break Order costs £399. This fee covers the preparation and submission of all necessary documents and communication with the court to ensure a smooth and efficient process.

The process to secure a Clean Break Order typically takes around 8 weeks – this is 4 weeks to draft and 4 weeks for the court to approve the Clean Break Order. If you opt for our Fast Track service, the consent order can be ready for court filing within 1 week of receiving your application, and it takes the court on average 4 weeks to approve so total time from start to finish of 5 weeks.

To apply for a Clean Break Order, you will need to provide key pieces of information which is submitted through our easy to use online questionnaire. This includes the following:

• Details of your financial situation:
  • Total equity held in properties
  • Total savings and investments
  • Total liabilities (not mortgage debt)
  • The total cash equivalent transfer value (CETV) of pensions
  • Monthly income broken down into income from employment, benefits, child maintenance payments, pension or other sources.
  • Any prior agreements or settlements made with your ex-partner

You cannot get a Clean Break Order without disclosing this information.
You don’t need to provide bank statements, property valuations, or other evidence. However, if the court found that a party had been deliberately withholding information to deceive the other party or the court, the Clean Break Order could be voided, and the perpetrator could face prosecution for fraud.

In most cases, you will not need to appear in court to finalise the Clean Break Order. Our team handles all court communications and submissions on your behalf, making the process as smooth and stress-free as possible. The only time the court requests a hearing is if they are not satisfied that a Clean Break Order would be fair. If for example one party had a house and a pension and the other had nothing despite being married for 10 years the court would question the fairness of the agreement.

No, a Clean Break Order cannot cover child maintenance arrangements. If you have children under 18, you will need a Consent Order that provides clean break protection for you while also addressing responsibilities for child maintenance.

If you and your ex-partner agree on most matters but have some disagreements, Mediation is a valuable tool to resolve disputes without having to go to court.

While it is possible to file a Clean Break Order yourself, the success rate is low – a Clean Break Order is a very powerful document, it protects both parties from the other making a financial claim on the other in the future, for this reason the agreement must be rigorous and written in a very specific way. If you submit a Clean Break Order to yourself and the court refuses it, they will offer no guidance at all on how to correct it. They’ll simply tell you it’s wrong so you’ll have to get a solicitor to fix it, costing you more money and delays. Using a solicitor or a professional service like ours ensures that all documents are correctly prepared and submitted, minimising the risk of mistakes and delays.

Without a Clean Break Order, your ex-spouse could make future financial claims against you, even years after the divorce. This can include claims on any assets or income you acquire post-divorce. Obtaining a Clean Break Order provides legal protection and financial certainty.

Ensuring that the Clean Break Order is fair and equitable involves full disclosure of all assets and liabilities by both parties. Our team drafts your order that reflects your individual circumstances, and the court will review the agreement to ensure it is fair and reasonable.

No, you must make a separate application for a Clean Break Order. It is possible to get a divorce without a Clean Break Order, though this isn’t recommended because of the future financial risk.
Unless you buy a specific clean break divorce package, a fixed fee divorce never includes a clean break; it’s a separate service.

Yes, you do, 100%. Even if you currently own nothing, if you were married for a very short time or if you both get on great and would never claim against each other, you should still get a Clean Break Order. Anything can happen in the future, and a Clean Break Order will give you lifetime protection and peace of mind for such a small cost.

No, you can’t. To get a Clean Break Order, the court must have permitted you to divorce. This is known as a conditional order or a decree nisi under the old law. To get permission to divorce, you must have started divorce proceedings.

You can only apply to the court to approve a Clean Break Orderr once you have started the divorce and reached the conditional order stage. You and your former spouse need to provide financial disclosure to start the Clean Break Order process, and it then takes four weeks to draft your Clean Break Order ready for submission to the court (a one-week fast-track service is also available). Ideally, you want to start the Clean Break Order process about a month before your conditional order date to ensure that all documents are ready for signing so they can be submitted to the court when your conditional order is given.

A D81 Statement of Information document must be completed and submitted to the court when applying for a Clean Break Order. This document shows your current financial position, which the court uses to decide if a Clean Break Order is fair.
The information needed is:

• Total equity held in properties
• Total savings and investments
• Total liabilities (not mortgage debt)
• The total value of pensions
• Monthly income broken down into income from employment, benefits, child maintenance payments, pension or other sources.

A Clean Break Order submitted to the court without any financial information raises questions in the court, so we ask our clients to sign a document if they don’t have any assets or liabilities.

No, you can’t. You must both agree, and your spouse must provide their financial information. We cannot apply for a clean break order if your spouse is unwilling to provide financial disclosure, and we can’t apply for a clean break order if they refuse to sign the statement of information and clean break order.

Once you’ve both signed the statement of information and Clean Break Order and you have your conditional order, we can submit the clean break to the court for approval. An Easy Online Divorce drafted and submitted consent order typically takes around four weeks to approve.

The court fee for submitting a Clean Break Order is £58. However, you will need a solicitor to draft your order, and the cost of this will depend on whether you use Easy Online Divorce or a traditional high street solicitor.

Let’s start with the bad news. Going to a high street solicitor can feel like the wild west. We speak to people daily, and the costs they have quoted to them vary wildly from the expected circa £750 + VAT to what can only be described as daylight robbery – £2,000 upwards.

The good news is that Easy Online Divorce has transparent fixed prices.

Our Clean Break Order is £399, including VAT.

Yes, you can get a Clean Break Order after a divorce. Although, the best practice is to finalise your financial arrangements before your final order or decree absolute.

Just remember that either party can make a financial claim against the other at any point after divorce unless you have a court-approved Clean Break Order. Some couples part on very good terms, sure that neither will make a claim, only to find themselves in a very hostile situation when one of them meets a new partner.

A Clean Break Order is a legally binding agreement approved by a judge. It is 100% watertight, and neither of you can ever claim the other.

A separation agreement, on the other hand, is usually drafted by a solicitor and signed by both parties but is not legally binding. To enforce it, you would have to go to court and apply for a contested financial order (which costs tens of thousands of pounds), so arguably, a separation agreement from a legal point of view isn’t worth the paper (or rather the solicitor costs) it’s written on.

No, the court doesn’t blindly approve Clean Break Orders, and they can question the fairness of your agreement. The Clean Break Order process is voluntary between couples, so the court won’t force you to do something if they disagree with your Clean Break Order. But they will ask questions to ensure that a person in a perceived weaker position is fully aware of the implications of the Clean Break Order.