California Funded a Fix for Its Court Reporter Shortage, Then Reverted the Money

A court reporter is the only thing standing between what happens in a courtroom and whether anyone can ever prove it happened.▸ No verbatim record, no real appeal — the California Supreme Court said as much in Jameson v. Desta (2018), calling its absence "often devastating" to a litigant's case. California has known its reporter workforce was shrinking for years, put real money behind fixing it, and then — twice — sent a chunk of that money back to the general fund unspent.

California trial courts employed 1,101 full-time-equivalent court reporters as of 2026, according to the Judicial Council's Shortage of Court Reporters in California dashboard (updated July 2026).▸ To meet the state's own minimum staffing formula, they need 458 more — a target of roughly 1,559.

Hiring hasn't closed the gap — it has barely kept pace with people leaving.▸ Between January 2023 and March 2026, courts hired 381.8 FTE reporters and lost 366.3 to attrition, a net gain of just 15.5 FTE against a 458-FTE hole, per the same dashboard. The pipeline behind that hiring is thin: only 176 new Certified Shorthand Reporter licenses were issued statewide in fiscal 2024–25, and of the 294 people who attempted the skills portion of the last three CSR exams, just 52.7% passed. Meanwhile the reporters already on the job are aging out — 48.1% of active licenses, as of June 3, 2026, were issued at least 30 years ago. The result shows up directly in the record: in the first quarter of 2026, 303,430 of 418,985 family, probate, and unlimited civil hearings — 72.4% — happened with no verbatim transcript at all, up from 71.6% for the twelve months ending September 2024, per the Judicial Council's January 2025 fact sheet.

The state didn't ignore this.▸ Starting in fiscal 2022–23, the Legislature built an ongoing $30 million General Fund appropriation to the Judicial Council, meant to be distributed to trial courts specifically to grow the number of court reporters in family-law and civil cases. It survived a proposed cut to $20 million in the 2024 May Revision and was held at $30 million in the enacted Budget Act of 2024.

But the program came with a catch: budget-bill language attached to it directs any portion trial courts don't spend back to the General Fund, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office's 2025-26 Budget: Judicial Branch report.▸ Courts didn't spend it fast enough. As part of the state's broader deficit-closing package, the enacted FY2024–25 budget reverted $16.1 million — $9.7 million appropriated for FY2022–23 and $6.4 million for FY2023–24 — of recruitment money that trial courts had left unused, per the LAO's 2024-25 Spending Plan: Judiciary and Criminal Justice report. That $16.1 million is less than what California courts spent in a single year, FY2024–25, just buying transcripts from the reporters they could get: $25.2 million, per the Judicial Council dashboard. Paying to live with the shortage now costs more than the state was willing to let trial courts keep to fix it.

Part of why courts struggle to spend the money is the market they're competing in.▸ A court-employed reporter's median total pay and benefits came to $205,031 in fiscal 2024–25, per the Judicial Council. Reporters working the private market — depositions, not courtrooms — can bill $2,580 a day for a deposition and $3,300 a day for a trial, according to a survey of 49 private consumer attorneys cited in the same January 2025 fact sheet. Los Angeles County has responded with a $50,000 signing bonus on top of a $15,000 tuition allowance and a $15,000 referral fee — an admission, in dollar terms, of how far behind the state-employee pay scale has fallen.

Workforce and hearing-record figures come from the Judicial Council's continuously updated dashboard (accessed July 2026) and its January 2025 fact sheet, which draw on different reporting windows noted in the prose above; budget figures come from the Legislative Analyst's Office's year-specific spending-plan reports.