The Jury Duty Fee Hasn't Moved Since 2018 — and Almost Didn't Get Paid at All

Jury service is compulsory.▸ Show up when summoned, or answer to a judge. In exchange, the federal government pays $50 a day — a rate set in 2018 and never revisited since. On October 10, 2025, with the government shut down and the judiciary's own funds running low, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan issued a notice warning jurors that even that check might stop coming: "payments for jury service may be delayed until a continuing resolution or appropriations bill funding the federal government is passed by Congress." Jurors facing "significant financial hardship" were told to say so during selection — not to a caseworker, but to the court, in open court.

The account that pays jurors — "Fees of Jurors and Commissioners" — doesn't behave like a normal budget line.▸ Congress cut its FY2026 appropriation to $19.1 million, down 67% from the $58.2 million enacted the year before. That sounds like a program in freefall. It isn't: the judiciary expects to pay out $46.4 million in juror fees and expenses in FY2026 regardless, because most of the bill is covered by money carried forward from prior years, not by the year's own appropriation.

Fifty-nine percent of what pays jurors this year is leftover money, not new funding, per the Administrative Office's FY2027 Congressional Budget Justification.▸ That cushion is what let the headline appropriation swing 67% down and then 94% back up (to a requested $37.1 million for FY2027) without jurors noticing — most years. It is also exactly the kind of buffer that runs thin during a prolonged lapse in appropriations, which is what nearly happened in October 2025: the Administrative Office confirmed the judiciary's paid operations ran out on October 17, financed only by court fee balances "not dependent on a new appropriation." Individual courts, closer to their own cash position, told jurors directly that their checks were not guaranteed.

Even funded on schedule, $50 a day is a specific number, and it's worth comparing to other numbers.▸ 28 U.S.C. § 1871 set the current rate via Pub. L. 115-141, effective 45 days after its March 23, 2018 enactment — up from $40, a rate that had itself stood since 1990. It has not moved since 2018.

Two comparisons.▸ An eight-hour day at the federal minimum wage — $7.25 an hour, unchanged since 2009 — comes to $58, already $8 more than the juror fee. And by Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U data, the $50 that bought a day of jury service in May 2018, when the rate took effect, would take $66.60 to buy today. The fee Congress set in 2018 has lost roughly a quarter of its purchasing power to inflation it never adjusted for.

None of this is drawing more citizens into the jury box — the opposite.▸ Fewer Americans are being summoned, seated, or serving at all, tracking a long decline in the number of cases that go to trial.

Petit jurors — the trial jurors who actually decide civil and criminal cases — fell from 349,852 in FY2019 to 264,660 in FY2025, a 24.4% drop, per the same Administrative Office document.▸ Grand jurors, who decide whether to indict, fell almost identically: 24.6%, from 183,196 to 138,111. The judiciary's own budget justification says the decline is "projected to continue" through FY2027. Fewer trials means fewer jurors, which means fewer Americans ever sit through the thing the Sixth and Seventh Amendments are built around — and the ones who still do are paid less, in real terms, than the ones who did in 2018.

"Available jurors" counts people present for selection or serving in a given fiscal year, not unique individuals — someone summoned twice in a year is counted twice, and the same person can appear in both the petit and grand juror counts. FY2026 figures are Administrative Office estimates and FY2027 figures are the pending budget request, not enacted appropriations.