Federal civil filings by district

Newest case numbers

The highest civil case number seen in each of the busiest districts, with where and when it was seen.

Case numbers run in order within a district's numbering sequence each year, so the newest one bounds how many civil cases that sequence has opened. Court feeds are the courts' public RSS feeds.

By year

Implied civil filings nationwide each year, with dockets observed and the official count where it is published.

Implied counts come straight from case numbers. Calibrated counts scale each district's months so a year with an official table sums to it; years without a table loaded stay as counted. The current year runs to the newest full month of the snapshot and is scaled pro rata to the latest official twelve months. AO official counts are the Administrative Office of the US Courts civil filings for the calendar year (Table C-1).

How these numbers are made

Every figure here is arithmetic over public case numbers and dockets; none is a forecast except the hatched estimates.

1. Federal courts number civil cases in order each year, starting again on January first. The highest civil case number seen in a month, minus the highest seen the month before, counts the case numbers issued that month.
2. A month's highest number is replaced by the second highest when it sits far above it, and dropped when it passes the next month's lowest numbers. Both are typed errors.
3. Some divisional offices number from a base, such as sixty thousand and one in the Southern District of Florida. When an office's first numbers of the year sit just above a round thousand, that thousand is its base.
4. Offices whose monthly highs move together share one sequence and are counted once. Offices on their own sequences are added.
5. Jumps of more than twenty thousand in one month are dropped as numbering offsets. State and national figures add the districts. A year adds its months.
6. Calibration: for each district and year with an official count, the counted months are scaled so the year matches it, and months with no count take the year's monthly mean. The current year uses the latest official twelve months, pro rata.
7. After the snapshot, each district's live court feed shows its newest case number. The gap from the snapshot's last mark, spread over the days since, gives a daily pace, times the national official to counted ratio of the prior year. Districts without a live counter use their recent calibrated pace.
8. Hatched bars are estimates (method projection-1.0): the mean of the six complete periods before them plus their trend, never below what was observed. Leaderboards use observed figures only.

Sequences include cases that were transferred, consolidated, or opened in error, so the number is an upper bound on filings. A few courts assign numbers per divisional office, so office digits must be grouped separately. Year rollover resets the sequence on January 1. PACER case numbers are public record.

Implied counts come from case-number sequences and are an upper bound on filings. Observed counts are dockets this site holds. Official counts are published by the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

• CourtListener bulk data, dockets file dockets-2026-09-30.csv.bz2 (Free Law Project).
• Statistical Tables for the Federal Judiciary, Table C-1, Administrative Office of the US Courts.
• JS 44 civil cover sheet, for the nature-of-suit codes.

Related: Methodology, Inertia, Principles, Corrections, Takedown requests.