The PACER Paywall: Why Americans Pay $0.10 a Page for Court Records They Already Funded — And How 2026 Is Quietly Changing That

A $231 million federal program. 619 million record requests. A $125 million refund settlement just affirmed on appeal. And a quiet 2026 modernization that may finally end America's three-decade paywall on public court records.

On a Tuesday morning in March 2026, two federal judges walked into the marble-floored chambers of the Judicial Conference of the United States and delivered news that, in the language of bureaucratic transformation, amounted to a confession. The Public Access to Court Electronic Records system — the federal courts' three-decade-old paywall, known to the lawyers, journalists, paralegals, pro-se litigants, and ordinary citizens who depend on it as PACER — is "outdated, unsustainable, and require[s] replacement." That phrase was not the wording of a critic. It was the verdict of the very judge who runs the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Judge Robert J. Conrad Jr., delivered to Congress in his sworn written testimony in May 2025 [uscourts.gov].

The phrase was repeated almost verbatim ten months later, in a March 10, 2026 announcement from the Conference itself, where Appellate Judge Michael Y. Scudder, who chairs the Judicial Conference's Information Technology Committee, told colleagues that the project to replace PACER was now "on a fast track, with initial components being tested this year at six courts around the country." The new schedule, he said, is "two to three years sooner than originally expected" [uscourts.gov].

What the Conference would not say out loud is the rest of the sentence: the system is being replaced because it was attacked. In August 2025, the Administrative Office disclosed that the federal Judiciary's case management system had suffered "escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature," targeting the very sealed court documents that PACER's paywall is supposed to protect. The Office promised "more rigorous procedures to restrict access to sensitive documents" and noted the new measures had been "decisively" deployed since August 2025 [uscourts.gov].

A breach behind the paywall changed the conversation. For a quarter century, the Judiciary's position was that the ten-cents-per-page charge was a stable, modest, user-funded model that paid for itself. By spring 2026 — with $125 million already owed to overcharged users, with the Federal Circuit having affirmed that judgment in March, with cyber-criminals having reached past the paywall, and with the Director of the Administrative Office telling Congress the architecture must be torn down — that position no longer held.

The Ten-Cent Tax on Public Information

The official price of a page of federal court information, as set by the Judicial Conference of the United States and published in the Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule [uscourts.gov], is ten cents. That price has not changed since the Conference last revised the schedule, effective January 1, 2020. Every page of every docket, motion, brief, judgment, order, transcript, and case-specific report retrieved via PACER costs the user $0.10 per page, "not to exceed the fee for thirty pages." Translated, that means most documents are capped at $3.00. Transcripts, search-result pages, and non-case-specific reports have no cap. Audio files of court hearings cost $2.40 each. A targeted search at the PACER Service Center — for example, to find all federal cases against a particular name — costs $30.00 per name searched, plus the per-page charges on whatever it returns [pacer.uscourts.gov].

The mechanism by which the Judiciary softens that price is a per-quarter waiver. As of January 1, 2020, an account holder who accrues less than $30.00 in charges in a given quarter — January through March, April through June, July through September, October through December — is not billed at all [pacer.uscourts.gov]. The waiver was doubled in September 2019, from $15 to $30, by the Judicial Conference as part of what the Administrative Office at the time billed as a measure that "will result in more than 75 percent of the system's users paying no fee in a given quarter" [uscourts.gov].

By the Judiciary's own most recent counting, the waiver works for the casual researcher. In its FY 2026 budget appendix — the formal document that sets out the Electronic Public Access program's resources — the Administrative Office reports that "in FY 2024, approximately 84.0 percent of active PACER users accessed court records for free as a result of the fee waiver." That same fiscal year, "PACER processed slightly over 619 million requests for case information," and the Service Center established 371,963 new PACER accounts while responding to more than 309,000 telephone and email inquiries [uscourts.gov].

Read carefully, the 84-percent figure is also the limit of the case for PACER. It describes "active users." It does not describe how much information those users obtained, nor the 16 percent who did pay. That 16 percent is the soft tissue of an old admission the Administrative Office made in its own 2019 press release: "approximately 87 percent of all PACER revenue is attributable to just 2 percent of users — large financial institutions and major commercial enterprises that aggregate massive amounts of data for analysis and resale" [uscourts.gov].

This is the central irony of the PACER paywall. The system was designed, in theory, to make the courts self-funding through a small charge on the people who use them most. In practice, the people who use them most are corporations, which have built data businesses on the backs of public records they pay pennies to retrieve. The remaining users — pro-se litigants, journalists, academics, defense attorneys, small-firm lawyers, public-records nonprofits — are not the engine of revenue. They are collateral damage.

Who PACER Does Not Help: The Fine Print of Exemptions

The official discretionary exemption policy is published as part of the EPA Fee Schedule itself. Courts may exempt "indigents, bankruptcy case trustees, pro bono attorneys, pro bono alternative dispute resolution neutrals, Section 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organizations, and individual researchers associated with educational institutions." The exemption is not automatic; the requestor must petition the court "from which you are requesting the exemption," show "an exemption is necessary in order to avoid unreasonable burdens and to promote public access to information," and, if granted, agree "not to sell the data obtained as a result, and must not transfer any data obtained as the result of a fee exemption, unless expressly authorized by the court" [uscourts.gov].

What the fee schedule says next, in language not generally quoted in press releases, is who courts should not exempt. The Conference's policy is explicit. The exclusion list reads: "local, state or federal government agencies, members of the media, privately paid attorneys or others who have the ability to pay the fee" [uscourts.gov].

It is worth pausing on that sentence. Federal court records are the records of the only courts that decide federal-question litigation, federal criminal cases, federal habeas petitions, federal civil-rights claims, federal bankruptcies, and major multi-district class actions. The press, as a matter of black-letter constitutional doctrine, stands in for the public when scrutinizing those proceedings. Yet the Conference's official policy treats reporters as a category that "should not" receive fee relief — alongside government agencies and privately paid lawyers who can pass the cost to clients. The unstated assumption is that a newspaper, a freelance investigator, or a documentary researcher should be able to afford the same fees as a Wall Street data shop. As of spring 2026, that assumption is unchanged.

The Judicial Conference has, to its credit, separately enumerated a free path for the indigent and for parties in the case. The fee schedule lists five automatic exemptions: the $30-per-quarter accrual waiver; one free electronic copy for parties and attorneys of record when delivered by notice of electronic filing; free access to judicial opinions; free viewing of case information at courthouse public-access terminals; and free quarterly downloads for Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustees [uscourts.gov]. The courthouse-terminal option, in particular, is the access door the Judiciary routinely highlights when defending the paywall. It is also, for the citizen who lives a hundred miles from the nearest federal courthouse, a door that requires gas money and a workday off.

The Lawsuit That Forced a Refund

For years, the legal academy and a small group of nonprofits argued that PACER fees were not merely high, but unlawful. The argument turned on the statute that authorizes the fees, which permits the Judiciary to charge "reasonable fees" only for the costs of providing electronic access. Plaintiffs alleged the Administrative Office had spent PACER revenue on a long list of unrelated projects.

In 2016, three nonprofit organizations — the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice — sued under the Little Tucker Act on behalf of a class of PACER users. After "nearly eight years of litigation, which encompassed substantial motion practice, an interlocutory appeal, and protracted negotiations, the case settled for $125,000,000," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit wrote in its opinion of March 20, 2026, affirming the settlement against an objector's appeal [cafc.uscourts.gov].

The court's opinion, in plain English, listed what the government had been doing with PACER money. "Prior to this litigation, PACER fees were used not only to fund the operation of PACER, but also to fund six other categories of expenses: (1) the Case Management and Electronic Case Filing ('CM/ECF') System; (2) Electronic Bankruptcy Noticing ('EBN'); (3) the State of Mississippi Study; (4) the Violent Crime Control Act Notification System; (5) Web-Based Juror Services; and (6) Courtroom Technology" [cafc.uscourts.gov].

The court of appeals' enumeration — six categories, all of them ordinary judicial-administration expenses, all of them funded out of fees that statutory text said were for electronic public access only — is the closest a federal court has come to officially calling PACER a slush fund. Notice was provided to "more than 500,000 PACER account holders," the panel wrote. The settlement guarantees each class member "a minimum payment equal to the lesser of $350 or the total amount of PACER fees the class member paid during the class period." Remaining funds are distributed pro rata to users who paid more than $350 [cafc.uscourts.gov].

The opinion is short — twenty-six pages — and reads as a clean affirmance of the settlement against a lone pro se objector. Yet its enumeration of misused funds is the only place in the federal reporter where the official categories of PACER misspending are now memorialized. It functions, in effect, as a judicial admission: for at least a decade, the federal Judiciary used revenue from the public-access paywall to underwrite IT projects the public was not paying to use. The $125 million is the price of unwinding that. The $231 million annual EPA program budget projected for FY 2026 [uscourts.gov] is the price of operating PACER going forward — a price that, unless the modernization plan changes course, will still be paid by users.

The People Locked Out

Every paywall has casualties. PACER's are documented in the fine print of unrelated litigation — the pro-se motion that arrives unsigned because the litigant could not pull the prior order; the FOIA suit where the requester turns to the Justice Department because the records they seek are sealed in a federal docket they cannot afford; the academic paper that quotes from a leaked filing because the researcher exhausted the $30-per-quarter waiver in a single afternoon. The federal courts do not measure these casualties. But they appear in the federal reporter all the same.

In Kalbers v. U.S. Department of Justice, 166 F.4th 783 (9th Cir. 2026), decided January 30, 2026, a California law professor sought "nearly six million documents Volkswagen produced to the U.S. Department of Justice" during the Dieselgate investigation. Professor Lance Kalbers wanted to know whether DOJ had offered Volkswagen "a 'sweetheart deal.'" The Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Ryan D. Nelson, held DOJ could withhold the production entirely under FOIA Exemption 3 because it was grand-jury material [justice.gov; ca9.uscourts.gov]. Kalbers is not a PACER case. But it illustrates why the two are inseparable in modern federal practice: a researcher seeking court-adjacent records can be locked out by sealing orders, by grand-jury secrecy, and by the per-page price of merely confirming what the docket says. The underlying federal docket — what a journalist or graduate student needs even to begin asking the Ninth Circuit's question — sits on PACER, ten cents at a time.

The Cyber-Attack That Forced the Modernization

For the first three decades of PACER's life, the Judiciary's most consistent reform argument against critics was an accounting argument. The system was cheap to operate, the fees were modest, the cross-subsidy from heavy commercial users to indigent and pro-se users was elegant, and the public could always walk into a courthouse to read for free. None of that argument addressed security. In August 2025, the security argument arrived.

The Administrative Office's August 7, 2025 statement is one of the most candid public acknowledgments any branch of the federal government has made about a cyber-intrusion since the SolarWinds disclosures. "The federal Judiciary is taking additional steps to strengthen protections for sensitive case documents in response to recent escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature on its case management system," the statement read. "Some filings contain confidential or proprietary information that are sealed from public view. These sensitive documents can be targets of interest to a range of threat actors" [uscourts.gov].

By the time the Judicial Conference convened in March 2026, the response had a name: replacement. Appellate Judge Michael Y. Scudder, who chairs the Information Technology Committee, told the Conference that "the new system will replace the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF) that the courts have relied on for nearly three decades to manage heavy caseloads and carry out court operations. It is used by litigants to file cases and related documents, and it provides the public with access to over 1 billion court records." District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove, chairman of the Committee on Court Administration and Case Management, added that the project is "one we are accelerating to meet our security and operational needs. We must do this given the acute and persistent risk faced by our current CM/ECF system" [uscourts.gov].

The Conference's March 10 announcement carries a sentence that, read in context, is more consequential than any line item in the FY 2026 budget. "Improving the search functionality of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system is a key component of the modernization project" [uscourts.gov]. The implication, which the Conference did not spell out, is that PACER's notoriously bad search — flat-rate $0.10 per page even when the search returns nothing, no full-text indexing across districts, no faceted filters — is on the to-do list. So is the underlying database. So, by Judge Conrad's own testimony, is the pricing model that funds the whole thing.

"Consistent with the funding structure for the existing CM/ECF system, we intend to fund CM/ECF modernization efforts from the user fees we collect from providing electronic access to court documents via PACER, rather than appropriated dollars," Conrad wrote in his May 2025 House statement. He immediately added a qualifier that PACER reformers will find significant: "We have no preference for PACER user fees as the funding source for CM/ECF and PACER; however, it is critical that there is a stable, predictable funding stream to ensure we can modernize and operate the systems" [uscourts.gov]. The Director of the Administrative Office, in other words, has told the House Judiciary Committee that the courts do not need to fund the next-generation system through paywall fees. They simply need some predictable stream.

Congress's Recurring, Unfinished Reform

Reform of PACER is not a new idea in Congress. The Open Courts Act of 2021 (S. 2614), introduced in the 117th Congress, would have required the Administrative Office "to establish a single electronic system for all public court records that is publicly accessible" and would have eliminated PACER fees outright, replacing the revenue with higher filing fees on civil and bankruptcy litigants. The Congressional Budget Office's analysis projected that "beginning in 2026, the legislation would eliminate PACER fees and authorize higher fees for filing civil and bankruptcy cases in federal courts" [congress.gov; cbo.gov]. The bill never reached a floor vote in either chamber.

The 119th Congress, which convened in January 2025, has taken up the question again. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held a hearing on February 26, 2025, that included PACER on its agenda. The Subcommittee's stated purpose was to "examine the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system" [congress.gov]. A May 2025 hearing of the same committee, titled "Fiscal Accountability and Oversight of the Federal Courts," took up adjacent questions of judiciary funding and revenue [congress.gov].

The most consequential piece of pending legislation, however, is one the Judiciary itself drafted. In September 2025, Judge Conrad transmitted to Congress a draft bill called the Judicial Improvements and Technical Corrections Act of 2025. The bill "includes provisions to increase electronic bankruptcy noticing, eliminate unnecessary bail reports, and allow magistrate judges to handle more misdemeanor matters," according to the Director's Annual Report 2025. "Key House and Senate Judiciary Committee staff were provided background information and briefings on the proposed legislation" [uscourts.gov].

The Judicial Improvements bill is not a PACER reform bill. Its language does not, on its face, eliminate fees or end the paywall. But its existence is significant for a different reason: it is the first time since the Open Courts Act fight in 2020-2021 that the Administrative Office has formally proposed legislative changes to court administration in tandem with a modernization push. The bill, the cyber-attack response, the March 2026 acceleration, and the $125 million Federal Circuit affirmance all arrived within a twelve-month window. Together, they constitute the first credible signal in twenty-five years that the federal courts may be willing to reopen the question of whether public records should be priced as commodities.

The Budget Crisis Lurking Behind the Reform

None of this is happening on a fully-funded campus. The federal Judiciary's broader budget posture, as Judge Conrad and Seventh Circuit Judge Amy J. St. Eve told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government in May 2025, is one of "two straight years of flat funding in most accounts" and a request for "a 9.3 percent increase in appropriations for the upcoming fiscal year." The Judiciary's total FY 2026 discretionary request is $9.4 billion, with an additional $872 million in mandatory funding for judicial salaries and retirement costs [uscourts.gov].

Within that envelope, the Electronic Public Access program is comparatively small: a total FY 2026 requirement of "approximately $231.0 million," against projected fee revenue of "approximately $142.0 million in both FY 2025 and FY 2026" [uscourts.gov]. The gap — roughly $89 million — is the cost of operating PACER and CM/ECF that fees do not cover. The Judiciary's position is that user fees should grow to cover that gap and the modernization costs. The Open Courts Act took the opposite view: filing fees on plaintiffs should fund court technology. As of May 2026, neither position is law.

The Judiciary's caseload is itself in quiet rebalancing. According to Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics 2025, U.S. District Court civil filings stood at 271,802 in the 12-month period ending March 31, 2025 — a 21.9-percent drop from 2024 — while civil terminations more than doubled to 507,326. Criminal defendants filed rose 11.5 percent to 73,644. Bankruptcy filings rose 13.1 percent to 529,080 [uscourts.gov]. These are the records that move through PACER, ten cents per page.

What Public-Records Users Can Do Today

For the citizen, journalist, or pro-se litigant who needs federal court records before the modernization arrives, the official Administrative Office position is that several free pathways exist. They are listed below in the order of how reliably they work.

Use the $30-per-quarter waiver

This is the most straightforward, and the only one the Administrative Office advertises in its main pricing page. A PACER account is free to register. If accrued charges remain under $30.00 in a calendar quarter, the user is not billed. For a freelance journalist tracking a single docket, this is workable. For a researcher running a hundred-name search, it is not [pacer.uscourts.gov].

Request a court-specific fee exemption

Indigent litigants, pro-se litigants, pro-bono attorneys, 501(c)(3) nonprofits, and individual researchers associated with educational institutions may petition individual courts. Each district maintains its own procedure; the petitioner must show "an exemption is necessary in order to avoid unreasonable burdens." The exemption, if granted, is time-limited, scope-limited, and revocable. The data obtained cannot be sold or redistributed without express court permission [uscourts.gov]. Members of the media are explicitly excluded from this list by Conference policy.

Use a courthouse public-access terminal

Every federal courthouse maintains public-access terminals where viewing case information and documents is free of charge. Printing a copy costs $0.10 per page. This option is comprehensive — virtually any docket can be viewed — but it requires being physically present in a courthouse during business hours [uscourts.gov].

Read judicial opinions and pull aggregate data — free

"No fee is charged for access to judicial opinions," the EPA Fee Schedule states. Opinions are also independently published, free of charge, on the U.S. Government Publishing Office's govinfo.gov platform — "more than 130 courts" dating back to April 2004 [pacer.uscourts.gov]. The Federal Judicial Center maintains the Federal Court Cases Integrated Database [fjc.gov], which contains civil-case and criminal-defendant filing data for the district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts. It is free, and while it does not contain the underlying filings, it answers many statistical questions PACER would otherwise charge for.

For aggregated state court coverage, consult a free public-records portal

The records discussed in this article are federal-court records. State court records — for example, criminal complaints filed in state superior courts, business-litigation dockets in state civil courts, and county-level filings — are managed by individual states. Open-public-records.com maintains a free, citizen-facing index of state court cases and related public records. Examples of state-court case pages on the site, all maintained from official state-court releases and docket information, include:

None of those state-court pages cost the reader a dime. They sit, alongside the federal cases discussed above, in a category the Administrative Office's own policy memos describe approvingly: free local court information provided to benefit the public. The Conference's fee schedule, in fact, expressly permits courts to "provide local court information at no cost (e.g., local rules, court forms, news items, court calendars, and other information) to benefit the public" [uscourts.gov]. Whether federal records eventually move into the same category — free, indexed, searchable, public — is the question now in front of Judge Scudder, Judge Van Tatenhove, Judge Conrad, the House Judiciary Committee, and the 26-member Judicial Conference itself.

The Principle Underneath the Paywall

There is a phrase, repeated almost verbatim in every PACER announcement the Administrative Office has issued since the early 2000s, that frames the official position: "PACER provides the public with instantaneous access to virtually every document filed in every federal court. No tax dollars are expended for the operation and maintenance of PACER. Only those who use the system pay for it" [uscourts.gov]. The phrase has rhetorical elegance. It is also, on the evidence assembled here, only partly true.

Tax dollars do not, by appropriation, fund PACER. But for at least a decade, PACER fees did fund Case Management and Electronic Case Filing, Electronic Bankruptcy Noticing, the Mississippi Study, Web-Based Juror Services, the Violent Crime Control Act Notification System, and general Courtroom Technology — the six categories enumerated in the Federal Circuit's March 20, 2026 opinion in NVLSP v. United States [cafc.uscourts.gov]. The 87-percent-from-2-percent imbalance, the corporate users that built data businesses on top of the records, the journalists explicitly excluded from fee exemption, the indigent litigant who must petition each district separately for relief — all of these structural realities mean the phrase "only those who use the system pay for it" obscures more than it discloses.

The genuinely interesting development of 2025 and 2026 is that the Judiciary itself appears to know this. Judge Conrad's May 2025 testimony — declaring CM/ECF and PACER "outdated, unsustainable, and require[ing] replacement," and stating that the Judiciary has "no preference for PACER user fees as the funding source" — is the most consequential public statement on PACER reform any senior federal judicial administrator has made in two decades [uscourts.gov]. What happens next depends, as it always has, on Congress and the Judicial Conference acting in tandem. The legislative architecture exists in reform bills before the 119th Congress and in the Judicial Improvements and Technical Corrections Act of 2025. The modernization architecture exists in the six pathfinder courts now testing new components. The legal architecture exists in the Federal Circuit's affirmed $125 million refund.

What is missing is the political will to convert all of that into the simple proposition that public court records — the records of judges paid by taxpayers, ruling in courthouses built by taxpayers, on the public business of the United States — should be free to read. That proposition is not radical. It is implicit in the Conference's own policy that "no fee is charged for access to judicial opinions." The question is whether it extends, finally, to the dockets and the filings beneath the opinions.

For now, the answer remains $0.10 a page, capped at $3.00 per document, no cap on searches, no exemption for the press, and a $30-per-quarter waiver that is the difference between casual access and a billing-cycle decision. The 619 million record requests of FY 2024 will be followed by a higher number in FY 2025 and a higher one still in FY 2026. The 84 percent of users who walk away free will continue to walk away free. The 2 percent who pay 87 percent of the bill will continue to pay it, and pass the cost along to the customers of their data products. The modernization announced in March 2026 will, on the Judiciary's own accelerated timeline, take two to three years.

The clock is running. So is the meter.