The U.S. federal judiciary is raising the price of downloading federal court records through PACER, the online system lawyers, journalists, researchers and the public use to get filings that are already public records.
Reuters reported that the executive committee of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary’s top policymaking body, approved a temporary fee increase from 10 cents per page to 12 cents per page. The higher price is scheduled to run for five years starting January 1.
The judiciary says the extra money will speed work on a new case management and public access system with better security. That is the official rationale. The awkward bit is that PACER’s access-control and billing machinery is part of what makes the system expensive and complicated in the first place.
What changes for PACER users
PACER, short for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, charges users by the page for filings pulled from federal courts. Techdirt, which has long criticized the system, notes that PACER also meters some interactions that are not document downloads in the ordinary sense, including search-result pages.
The judiciary said it will also raise the quarterly fee waiver threshold. Users who incur $40 or less in PACER fees in a quarter will not be billed, up from the current $30 threshold, according to Reuters. The judiciary said that change should keep most individual users from paying, while heavier users such as law firms would still face charges.
Judge Robert Conrad, director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said in a judiciary statement cited by Reuters that without what he called a modest fee increase, the courts would not collect enough money to deliver the case management system needed for secure operations.
That explanation will not quiet critics who have spent years arguing that PACER’s fee model is a relic of the photocopier era. The basic transaction is now a PDF served over the internet, not a clerk making paper copies at a counter. Charging by the page in 2026 has the same retro charm as metered dial-up, with less nostalgia.
A long fight over public access
The legal fight over PACER fees has already produced embarrassment for the courts. Techdirt has pointed to litigation in which federal courts agreed to refund fees they had overcharged users for access to PACER. Critics have argued that the judiciary used PACER revenue for expenses beyond the system itself, despite limits on how those fees were supposed to be used.
Congress has also had chances to change the model. The Open Courts Act, backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, would make PACER records free to access. Similar proposals have appeared before and stalled, according to Techdirt.
The Congressional Budget Office previously undercut one of the judiciary’s central objections to free access. Techdirt cited a CBO analysis finding that making PACER free would have little net cost because removing the payment and account system would also eliminate costs tied to running that system.
The result is a familiar government technology loop: build a paywall around public records, collect money to administer the paywall, then raise prices to secure and replace the system that the paywall helped make necessary. The judiciary says the increase is temporary. Users will be forgiven for reading that word with care.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
