PACER Fees Are Going Up 20%. They Should Be Going Away.

On January 1, PACER will implement a 20% rate hike—meaning the federal courts’ clunky, insecure, and painfully expensive electronic records system will become even more expensive for the millions who use it to read public court documents.

Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) was created in 1988 by the Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body of the federal courts. PACER is the system that facilitates public access to federal court records: rulings, transcripts, and nearly every document filed by a judge or the parties in a case. It’s one part of the technical systems supporting the courts; there’s also Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF), which federal courts use to accept electronic filings, track court calendars, and much more.

PACER’s fees date back to the beginning. At launch, it offered only docket sheets and case summaries, delivered over a dial-up phone connection, and users paid by the minute. Later, the judiciary set a fee structure for accessing PACER documents online based on how many pages were viewed—originally 7 cents per page, then 8 cents, currently 10 cents, and soon jumping up to 12 cents. In 1988, PACER was a forward-thinking system. Today, it’s an expensive, outdated barrier between the public and its own court records.

For years, Free Law Project and others have pushed to make court records freely available to the public. The judiciary’s answer? A “temporary” rate hike that lasts five years. And history isn’t on the public’s side: once per-page PACER fees go up, they’ve never come back down.

Here’s what the fee hike won’t fix:

1. PACER is absurdly expensive—and it doesn’t need to be.

Charging users per page to access court records might have made sense in an analog era when creating photocopies of documents cost ink, paper, specialized machinery, and human hours. But it’s a ludicrous system when the files are digital. Storing and sending a 500-page filing costs the courts essentially the same as a 5-page one.

In 2016, Free Law Project analyzed court records stored in PACER and estimated that buying every document in PACER under the current fee structure would cost about $1 billion. That’s an exorbitant amount of money for public documents.

Notably, PACER doesn’t only charge users for the documents they download. It also charges users to simply search for cases. Users are charged anytime a search is performed, and the fee is based on the number of pages of search results viewed. If the search is fruitless and there are “no matches found,” PACER will charge users one billable page. While PACER puts a $3.00 cap on how much it will charge users for a single court document and waives fees for those who use $30 or less per quarter (soon to be $40), there is no cap on how much it will charge users to search the database—one research session can easily cost over $100.

And PACER doesn’t need to charge these fees merely to maintain operations. In a class action lawsuit over PACER’s fees, U.S. Senior District Judge Paul Friedman found that from the beginning of fiscal year 2010 to the end of fiscal year 2016, the judiciary collected more than $920 million in PACER fees. In 2024, Friedman approved a $125 million settlement over PACER’s excessive fees, and in March 2026 the Federal Circuit upheld it.

Today PACER is still wildly expensive. A recently published Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts budget document shows PACER brought in $154.1 million in fees in 2025 (see Table A-2.1 “receipts”) and is expected to bring in $142 million in both 2026 and 2027.

Meanwhile, the cost of operating PACER is a small fraction of that. In 2017, technologist Thomas Lee and Free Law Project’s executive director Michael Lissner provided expert testimony that calculated the cost of serving all PACER data using commercial models at $227,399.84/year, a mere 0.16% of PACER’s revenue at the time. While that estimate would need to be adjusted due to fluctuations in the cost of data storage, inflation, and additional documents added to PACER, today it’s still orders of magnitude below what PACER is charging.

2. Congress chose not to cover the costs of PACER, and the public suffers for it.

In general, Congress holds the purse strings for federal government expenses. It could appropriate funds for PACER or ban fees, but instead it allows the Judicial Conference to set fees. In 2002 Congress passed the E-Government Act, which required courts to make e-filed documents publicly available and limited the Judicial Conference to charging fees for electronic access “only to the extent necessary.”

Congress never funded PACER, even though the cost would have been a rounding error in the federal budget. Instead, it let the courts keep collecting millions a year from the people who use the system.

Those costs are not borne equally across the United States. Individuals who can afford lawyers to navigate the legal system on their behalf will rarely, if ever, interact with PACER. And attorneys paid by these clients can build PACER costs into their billable rate.

So, who suffers from these costs? Communities most impacted are those that can’t afford expensive legal services but are still driven to engage with the court system. This often means legal services organizations that offer free, low-cost, and nonprofit legal services to the public. The quarterly fee waiver helps someone looking up a single case, but one research session can swiftly exceed that exemption. This could have a huge impact on many users, like a legal aid service tracking cases, a journalist following a prosecution, a researcher studying how courts rule, or just a curious citizen wanting to follow cases against a candidate for office before an election.

3. PACER is bad tech.

In 2021, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) spoke out against the technical problems of PACER in an effort to pass legislation to reform the system, saying: “The PACER system is not keeping pace with reality and technology. Its search function is torturous. There’s no uniformity in filings from all 94 district courts and 13 appellate courts. It’s time for us to do something.”

PACER has a history of cybersecurity problems, which Free Law Project has long criticized. In 2021, the court system hurried to implement new security protocols in the wake of the SolarWinds supply-chain cyberattack. Parts of PACER also went down in 2022 while the public was awaiting the release of the affidavit for the search at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. As former acting U.S. solicitor general Neal Katyal wrote at the time on Twitter: “PACER is, and always has been, a disaster. And the idea that Americans have been paying for it by the page is nuts.”

Problems have persisted. Last year the federal courts’ electronic system—including PACER—suffered a sweeping hack that impacted sensitive court data across multiple states. Politico reported that the breach was “feared to have compromised the identities of confidential informants involved in criminal cases at multiple federal district courts.” To our knowledge, these informants have never been directly informed of the compromise.

In 2025, Seventh Circuit Judge Michael Scudder, chair of the judiciary’s IT committee, testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, stating that until recently, underinvestment in IT infrastructure “left our major systems and applications outdated and vulnerable. Many are not up to date with modern development standards or security protocols. The result is that our systems are expensive to operate, update, or replace; difficult to maintain; and at regular risk of either operational failure or security breaches.” The court systems are under active attack. He referenced about 200 million harmful events blocked by Judiciary systems in 2024 alone and noted that the threats are increasingly sophisticated. He concluded that the CM/ECF and PACER systems as they exist now are “outdated, unsustainable due to cyber risks, and require replacement.”

Beyond the significant cybersecurity concerns, PACER is also a UI nightmare for many of the people who use it. The complaints go back years, with researchers at the Prosecution Project writing in 2019, “PACER is an outdated system that takes time, practice, and patience to navigate. The system is far from advanced modern search engines.” In 2020, the head of the ACLU of Oklahoma called it “all but impossible” for the general public to use.

4. Paywalls on court documents impede democracy.

In the U.S., courts don’t merely apply the law; they serve a crucial role in deciding what it means. Judges interpret statutes, narrow them, and sometimes strike them down entirely.

The United States operates under what is known as a common law system. Lower courts must follow the decisions of higher courts, and lawyers make their case by citing how courts ruled in similar cases. In theory, federal rulings inside PACER should be available for free, but in practice many are not. And the rulings aren’t the full story. To understand why a court decided what it did, you often need the record behind it: the arguments, the evidence, the orders along the way. In the federal courts, most of that sits behind PACER’s paywall. Those paywalls are effectively fees on documents that are crucial to public understanding of how the law works.

The openness of the U.S. court system also serves as an important check on judges. Every judge knows their reasoning can be read and challenged by the public, the press, and other judges. As Seventh Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in a 2000 decision, “The political branches of government claim legitimacy by election, judges by reason. Any step that withdraws an element of the judicial process from public view makes the ensuing decision look more like fiat, which requires compelling justification.”

A paywall doesn’t seal a court decision, but it does create an unnecessary barrier to public scrutiny. The courts wouldn’t charge fees to sit in a courthouse, and shouldn’t be charging fees to see filings.

How we fix the PACER problem

To support our court system and the millions of people who rely on it, PACER needs to be replaced. The question is who should pay for that. The judiciary’s answer is to charge the public more, but there’s a far better solution.

Free Law Project joined Freedom of the Press Foundation, Fix the Court, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others in championing the bipartisan Open Courts Act of 2026, introduced by Sens. John Kennedy (R-LA) and Ron Wyden (D-OR). The bill would replace PACER with a modern, functional, secure system for court records and electronic filings and tear down the paywall between the public and court records. A modern system would also be far cheaper to run: the Congressional Budget Office estimated that an earlier version of the bill would cut annual operating costs from $64 million to $15 million.

But we also can’t wait for Congress to act. That’s why Free Law Project curates and maintains a massive archive of court documents on CourtListener, free to everyone. Our RECAP browser extension helps liberate even more: when a RECAP user buys a document on PACER, a copy goes to CourtListener so no one has to pay for it again. If you install RECAP, you can help liberate more PACER documents today.

Systems like PACER could make the courts more transparent and accountable to the public. Instead, PACER has been left to decay, locked behind a paywall that creates hardship for those who can least afford the fees. As Sen. Kennedy put it, “Americans should not have to sell plasma or wrestle with clunky government websites just to read public court records.”

The law belongs to everyone. Access to it should be secure, functional, and free.