Abstract The symmetric Kullback–Leibler divergence known as Jeffrey's divergence (JD) has found applications in signal and image processing, from radar clutter modeling to texture analysis. Recently, several studies were done on the JD between ergodic wide-sense stationary autoregressive (AR) and/or moving average (MA) processes. It was shown that the so-called asymptotic JD increment can be useful to compare ergodic wide-sense stationary ARMA processes. An interpretation of the asymptotic JD increment was also proposed. It consists in calculating the power of the first process filtered by the inverse filter associated with the second process, and conversely. However, in some biomedical applications, econometrics and other areas, long-memory processes have rather to be studied. Therefore, this paper aims at addressing the JD between ergodic wide-sense stationary autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) processes. More particularly, we study the influence of the ARFIMA parameters on the value of the asymptotic JD increment. Then, we analyze if the interpretation of the asymptotic JD increment based on inverse filtering is still valid for this type of process. Finally, some simulation results illustrate the theoretical analysis.