PACER Is a Public Access System That Charges You for Finding Nothing

What PACER Is, and What It Was Supposed to Be

In 1988, the federal judiciary asked Congress to appropriate funds to build an electronic public access system for court records. Congress declined to fund it and instead told the judiciary to cover the costs through user fees. That decision was made when storing and retrieving digital data was genuinely expensive. It has remained the operational framework for the system ever since, despite the fact that the cost of storing and retrieving static PDF files has dropped by roughly 99.9 percent since PACER first launched.

The E-Government Act of 2002 codified the fee authority with a constraint: fees could be charged “only to the extent necessary” to make the documents available to the public. That phrase has done almost no work in the intervening two decades. PACER has continued charging $0.10 per page for case documents, $0.10 per page for docket reports, $0.10 for any search regardless of whether it returns results, and $2.40 per audio file. The system caps individual document charges at $3.00, but the cap does not apply to transcripts or to name searches, which have no ceiling at all.

Users who accrue $30 or less in charges during a calendar quarter do not pay. The judiciary has pointed to this threshold as evidence of the system’s accessibility. What it means in practice is that anyone doing document-intensive work, journalists, legal researchers, advocacy organizations, public defenders reviewing federal case law, law students doing clinical work, and pro se litigants trying to understand cases that directly involve them, pays. The people for whom $30 per quarter represents a meaningful financial threshold are also the people least likely to be able to absorb the cost of meaningful legal research.

The Flat-Screen Problem

In April 2016, three nonprofits filed a class action in federal court arguing the PACER fee structure violated the E-Government Act. The National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Alliance for Justice alleged that fees were being charged well above what was necessary to operate the system and were being diverted to cover unrelated costs.

The court agreed. The record showed that PACER surplus revenues had been routed into the Judiciary Information Technology Fund and spent on, among other things, courtroom audio systems and flat-screen televisions for jury use. One amicus brief, led by the ACLU, described PACER revenues as having become “a kind of generalized information technology fund,” used for items related to courts and technology only in the sense that they involved both courts and technology.

The case settled in March 2024 for $125 million. Under the settlement terms, class members who paid $350 or less in PACER fees during the class period receive a full refund. Those who paid more receive $350 plus a pro rata share of the remaining fund based on what they paid above that threshold. The government did not admit wrongdoing.

As of late 2024, an objector filed an appeal arguing the pro rata allocation unfairly favored large-scale users. The Federal Circuit is reviewing that appeal. Until it resolves, no distributions can be made. The $125 million settlement, eight years of litigation, is sitting in a fund waiting on one objector’s appeal while the fee structure that generated the overcharges remains fully operational.

The Reform Bill That Cannot Get Out of Its Own Way

The Open Courts Act has been introduced in Congress repeatedly: in 2018, 2019, 2021, and subsequent sessions. It is bipartisan. It has cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee. It has never passed both chambers. The bill would eliminate PACER fees, mandate the Administrative Office to build a modern replacement system with free public access, and address the fragmented structure of the current system, in which each of the 94 district courts maintains its own database with its own URL and its own search interface.

That fragmentation is not a minor inconvenience. PACER is not one system. It is 94 systems that share a login and a billing structure. Searching for a case filed in the Eastern District of Michigan requires going to a different URL than searching for a case in the Western District. There is no universal search that works reliably across all courts. The PACER Case Locator exists to bridge this gap and charges separately for its searches.

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has actively worked against the reform legislation. Fix the Court, a judicial transparency advocacy organization, documented that the AO distributed lobbying materials to federal judges opposing the bill. Among the talking points: a projected cost of $2 billion to build the replacement system.

The reform bill has stalled in every session. The judiciary lobbied against it using a cost estimate that its opponents say is inflated by a factor of 100. The surplus fees that prompted the litigation have been partially addressed by the $30 quarterly threshold, which the AO implemented in 2020 and which eliminated charges for 75 percent of users. The 25 percent of users who do pay are, by definition, the heaviest users of federal court records: the press, researchers, legal aid organizations, and practitioners. The people for whom PACER fees are most consequential still pay them.

What People Actually Do Instead

The practical response to PACER’s cost and usability failures has been to build around them. RECAP is a free browser extension developed and maintained by the Free Law Project. When a PACER user downloads a document they have paid for, RECAP automatically uploads a copy to a shared public archive called CourtListener. Anyone can then access that document for free. The archive now holds tens of millions of documents.

This system works only for documents that someone with a PACER account has already paid to access. Newly filed documents, sealed records awaiting unsealing, and documents from less-trafficked cases are not automatically available. The coverage is real but uneven. What RECAP has built, in effect, is a public access layer on top of a system that charges for public access, sustained entirely by volunteer infrastructure and nonprofit funding.

The timeline of this issue is not a story of a system that was never meant to work. PACER was built with a genuine intent to make federal court records electronically accessible. The funding mechanism that Congress imposed in 1988 was a reasonable decision for 1988. The failure is that the mechanism was never revisited as storage costs collapsed, as digital access became the baseline expectation for public government records, and as the surplus revenue accumulated into a general-purpose fund the judiciary found convenient.

By the time a federal court ruled the fee use was unlawful, the overcharges had been running for years and the surplus had grown to nine figures. The settlement took eight years to reach. The distributions have not moved. The fee structure is still running. The reform bill is still stalled. And the $0.10 charge for a search that finds nothing is still on the fee schedule, because no one with the authority to change it has done so.

The Michigan Dimension

For readers who track Michigan federal litigation through Clutch Justice, the PACER problem is not abstract. Federal cases in the Eastern District of Michigan and the Western District of Michigan run through the same fee structure. The Bradley-Baskin guardianship fraud case, federal civil rights litigation arising from Michigan corrections practices, and appeals from state convictions that reach the Sixth Circuit all live behind the PACER paywall. Tracking those cases in real time, pulling docket entries and reviewing filed documents, costs money for every page accessed.

The practical effect is that resource-constrained organizations doing accountability work in Michigan federal courts pay a per-page toll that better-funded organizations treat as an operating expense. That asymmetry is not incidental to how federal transparency functions. It is built into the architecture of the access system.