What Can You Get on Top of That Judgment? Subtle Revisions to North Carolina’s Costs Statute That You Need to Know
By For nearly two decades, North Carolina litigators have wrestled with a deceptively simple question at the close of a case: what, exactly, can a prevailing party recover when a judgment awards “costs”? Senate Bill 257’s Special Provision 2026-AOC-C14-P, titled “Clarify Distinction Between Costs and Expenses Awarded,” amends N.C. Gen. Stat. § 6-20 and N.C. Gen. Stat. § 7A-305 to answer that question with more precision than the General Assembly has ever provided. The amendments became effective upon passage on July 7, 2026. They apply to judgments already entered and docketed. Litigators with pending post-judgment cost disputes should reassess their cost bills and any objections under the amended framework rather than assuming the prior statutory language controls.
What Changed
Historically, § 6-20 gave trial courts discretion to award “costs” in actions where cost-shifting was not otherwise addressed by statute, and it cross-referenced § 7A-305(d)’s “complete and exclusive” list of assessable items as the outer boundary on that discretion. The new legislation rewrites N.C. Gen. Stat. § 6-20 to refer to “expenses,” not “costs,” subject to the same limitations found in § 7A-305(d). The amendment also revises §§ 7A-305(a) and (a5) so that the enumerated filing fees and facility fees “shall be assessed and are recoverable,” rather than simply “assessed,” and it clarifies in subsection (f) that the $20 motion-notice fee “is recoverable.” These changes apply to actions pending or filed on or after the effective date and, notably, also reach judgments already entered and docketed where costs have been docketed but not yet finally resolved.
Why the Word “Expenses” Matters
The substitution of “expenses” for “costs” in § 6-20 is not stylistic. Litigators have long used “costs” as a catch-all term covering everything from filing fees to expert witness charges, but the statutory text in § 7A-305(d) has always spoken in terms of “expenses” that are “assessable or recoverable” separately from true court costs such as filing fees. By aligning § 6-20’s language with § 7A-305(d)’s, the legislature is clarifying that the item being awarded under § 7A is a defined statutory “expense.” For practitioners, this means motions for costs should now be more specific with the specific “expenses” enumerated in subsection (d) — witness fees, mediator fees, deposition-related stenographic and videographic charges, expert testimony fees, and the like — rather than in the looser, more expansive “costs” terminology that invited disputes in the past.
The Confusion the Amendments Are Designed to Resolve
Before 2007, courts were split over whether § 6-20 permitted trial judges to tax “common law” costs — items never listed in § 7A-305(d) — in addition to the statutory list, a split traced through Department of Transportation v. Charlotte Area Manufactured Housing, Inc.,[1] Lord v. Customized Consulting Specialty, Inc.,[2] and Cosentino v. Weeks.[3] The 2007 amendments to § 6-20 and § 7A-305(d) attempted to resolve that split, and the Court of Appeals in Khomyak v. Meek confirmed that the legislature had “eliminat[ed] any perceived discretion to tax ‘common law’ costs,” limiting trial courts to the items expressly listed in subsection (d).[4] Even with the 2007 fix, litigants and courts continued to blur “costs” and “expenses” in practice, generating recurring appellate disputes over whether a given charge was truly authorized. See, e.g., Lassiter v. N.C. Baptist Hospitals, Inc. 368 N.C. 367 (2015) (referring to expert witness fees as “costs”); Justus v. Rosner, 371 N.C. 818 (2018) (noting that trial court awarded a “lump sum” of costs that included expert witness fees).
How the Amendments Move the Needle
By recasting § 6-20 as an “expenses” statute tied to the § 7A-305(d) list, and by adding “and are recoverable” language throughout § 7A-305, the amendments clarify what precisely is recoverable and why. These amendments push practitioners and courts toward itemized, expense-by-expense analysis rather than a generalized “costs” request. This should reduce the kind of lump-sum awards criticized in Justus, because a request framed in “expenses” terms requires a line-by-line accounting keyed to specific subsection (d) categories. At the same time, the amendments do not expand the substantive list of recoverable items — the subsection (d) categories remain unchanged — so practitioners should not expect the amendments to open the door to previously unrecoverable items like general litigation overhead, travel or expert preparation time.
North Carolina’s cost-shifting statutes have never been a model of clarity, but by tying the discretionary language of § 6-20 directly to the “expenses” vocabulary of § 7A-305(d), the General Assembly has given litigators a sharper tool for framing — and defending against — cost and expense requests going forward.
[1] 160 N.C.App. 461 (2003).
[2] 164 N.C.App. 730 (2004).
[3] 160 N.C.App. 511 (2003).
[4] 214 N.C. App. 54, 59 (2011).
