PACER fees are increasing! The Federal Judiciary has approved temporary fee increases for Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) from 10 cents to 12 cents effective January 1^st, 2027, for a period of five years. This price increase has been introduced to offset some of the costs of the judiciary’s plans to modernize Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) for cybersecurity purposes.

To soften the blow of the price increases, the Judiciary will also raise the amount of waived fees from $30 to $40 per quarter. This means that if a PACER user accrues less than $40 in fees in a quarter then they will have all their fees waived for that quarter.  However, this may not provide much consolation for users who need to frequently access dockets on PACER since the 12 cents per page can add up quickly. While PACER currently has a $3.00 cap for retrieved documents, this cap does not extend to PACER search results or transcripts which can be quite lengthy and accrue many fees.

What does this mean for UNC Law students? Not much – there’s no need to change your docket research methods! As students at UNC Law School, you have free access to multiple tools capable of accessing court dockets for research purposes. Westlaw allows users to search federal and state dockets, Lexis allows users to search dockets via their CourtLink tool, and Bloomberg Law also hosts a docket search tool that includes features for docket tracking.

What if you are not currently a student at UNC Law? Members of the public, including small law firms and journalists, frequently need to search for court dockets without access to expansive legal database plans.

Whether you are a law student looking to practice cost-efficient research or a member of the public, there are some resources available to help users access court dockets on a budget, albeit each with their own limitations:

• Justia Dockets & Filings: Justia is a free site that allows users to search for dockets by circuit, state, filing date, or lawsuit type. Justia will allow you to view a summary of the case and its docket activity but will not allow the searcher to download docket materials and will instead redirect the user to PACER. Despite this restriction, Justia can be a helpful tool for searchers to browse dockets to find what they are looking for without racking up fees for search results in PACER.

• Court Listener RECAP Archive by the Free Law Project: The RECAP Archive, hosted by the Free Law Project, is a free resource which allows users to search for dockets with a search tool that is nearly identical to PACER’s, and allows for the ability to download court documents as long as the document has been purchased by another RECAP user via the RECAP browser extension. The RECAP extension automatically adds a document to the RECAP Archive if the user purchases said document through their own PACER. Therefore, while RECAP provides more access to documents than Justia, users are still limited to what other RECAP users have gathered for the archive. Still, this remains a rich archive of dockets that can be a great and free alternative to PACER.

• Don’t mind commuting? Viewing case information at any federal courthouse comes free of charge.

For those that need cost effective tools for finding federal court dockets, be sure to explore these publicly available resources, or like always, ask a librarian!