Federal court records cost $1 a page, and the system collects $150M a year

A dime a page for documents you already paid to create

PACER — Public Access to Court Electronic Records — is the federal judiciary's portal for reading court filings. It charges roughly ten cents a page, and by EFF's count it pulls in more than $150 million a year from the public, "despite court records being public documents."

EFF is backing the Open Courts Act of 2026, a bill to retire both PACER and the aging CM/ECF filing system and replace them with a single modern platform with no access fees. EFF has been hammering PACER's paywall for over a decade; a near-identical proposal once won bipartisan support in the Senate Judiciary Committee and then quietly failed to become law. The new bill is backed by the Free Law Project, Fix the Court, and a coalition of open-government and media groups.

The stakes are concrete in the thread. PACER's $1-cap-per-document feels cheap until you're a party to a case:

"PACER is for federal courts, price is $1 per page. I'm being sued in the State of Idaho, where the price of each page is $10." — a litigant facing per-page state-court fees

The principle underneath it is older than the software:

"the public should not have to pay to read the law. This goes back to Hammurabi… if we're held to these rulings we need to be able to read them." — a commenter tracing the rule to the first written code

The workaround that already exists: RECAP

While the law catches up, volunteers route around the paywall. The Free Law Project runs CourtListener and the RECAP browser extension: when anyone buys a document on PACER, RECAP automatically uploads a copy to CourtListener so the next person reads it for free. "Hopefully it will become obsolete soon," one user noted — meaning, hopefully the bill makes the hack unnecessary.

The sharpest dissent: "nothing is actually free"

The top comment didn't argue for the status quo so much as against the framing of free-as-in-costless. It came from one of the site's most-read voices:

"Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals… To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are… funding the legal profession." — tptacek

His analogy was lead pipes: his municipality forces homeowners to replace their own service lines, and everyone wants the city to pay — but the city's only money is property tax, so "there's no free money," and city-funded replacement is a regressive subsidy to homeowners. PACER, he argued, is the same conundrum: cheap, archaic, and mostly subsidizing a profession that can pay.

A quieter objection went the other way — toward privacy, not cost:

"It is one thing for the records to be publicly available, as they must be. It is a very different thing for every speck of material in them to be instantly available to anyone, anywhere, worldwide, for any purpose." — a commenter wary of frictionless bulk access

And a darker prediction about who really benefits from "free":

"If anything it'd be free for approved partners. Think large legal firms, language model data collectors, etc." — a commenter on who actually scrapes court data

The fight isn't whether records are public — it's who pays the toll

Nobody in the thread defended charging citizens to read the law. The split is over the bill on the table: end the toll and shift the cost to general taxes, where it lands partly on people who never touch a courtroom — or keep a usage fee that mostly bills the attorneys who live in PACER all day. Free Law Project's RECAP already proves the demand is real; the Open Courts Act is the question of whether the workaround stops being necessary.