State Prosecutors Spent $6.5 Billion. Most Won't Cap a Caseload.
Summary
In 2020, America's 2,347 state prosecutor offices spent $6.5 billion and employed more than 82,000 people, but 85% had no policy limiting how many cases one attorney could carry. A 2024 national survey of 4,504 prosecutors found 57% had seriously considered quitting — most who did blamed pay.
The budget scales with the jurisdiction. The caseload doesn't.
Prosecutor budgets track population almost exactly: the average office serving 1 million or more residents spent $36.6 million in 2020, 75 times what the average office serving fewer than 100,000 residents spent. That's the machinery working as designed — bigger caseload volume, bigger appropriation.
View data as table
| All offices (avg.) | $2.77M | $6.49B total, all offices, 2020 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000+ residents | $36.58M | |
| 500,000–999,999 | $18.03M | |
| 250,000–499,999 | $8.68M | |
| 100,000–249,999 | $2.71M | |
| Fewer than 100,000 | $0.49M |
What doesn't scale with the money is any limit on what a single prosecutor is expected to carry. Eighty-five percent of state prosecutor offices had no policy — written or unwritten — capping attorney caseload size in 2020, the highest "no policy" rate of any case-processing decision BJS asked about. Offices were far more likely to have at least an informal rule for bail recommendations, charging standards, or plea bargains than for how many cases one lawyer could be assigned.
View data as table
| Attorney caseload size | 85.1% | no written or unwritten policy |
|---|---|---|
| Declining referred cases without review | 53.9% | |
| Conviction integrity | 50.8% | |
| Bail recommendations, misdemeanors | 45.2% | |
| Bail recommendations, felonies | 34.2% | |
| Charging standards | 28.1% |
That gap shows up locally in real time. In Shasta County, California, the district attorney's office is funded for 28 prosecutor positions but has run roughly five vacant for years; when four more attorneys left in May 2026, the office was down to 16 deputy district attorneys reviewing more than 11,700 referred cases a year. "This is not a philosophical shift; it is a math problem," District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett said in a press release. "We simply do not have the number of prosecutors required to keep pace with the volume of cases being referred." Shasta County is one office, not a national data point — but it's the caseload-cap gap in the BJS numbers, made visible in a single building.
Pay, not burnout, is what people name
The NDAA survey asked prosecutors who'd thought about leaving why. Better pay led every other reason — ahead of well-being, work-life balance, and caseload itself. That's a different story than the one usually told about attrition in public-interest law: it isn't only that the job is hard, it's that the job is underpriced relative to the alternative. Nationally, average operating expenditures worked out to $184,910 per prosecuting attorney in 2020 — a figure that covers salary, benefits, and overhead combined, not take-home pay, and tracks far below what the same law degree earns in private practice.
The takeaway
- The money follows population; the workload limit doesn't exist. Office budgets scale almost linearly with the population served, but 85% of offices have no cap — formal or informal — on how many cases one prosecutor carries.
- Prosecutors are naming pay, not just burnout, as the reason to leave. In the NDAA's 2024 survey, 56% of prosecutors who'd considered quitting cited better pay as a top-three reason — more than cited heavy caseloads or their own well-being.
- The workforce grew 44% since 1992, but the profession's satisfaction with staying hasn't kept pace. More than 8 in 10 state prosecutor offices still don't govern the one variable — caseload per attorney — most directly tied to why people quit.
The $6.5 billion and 82,190-person figures describe 2020, the most recent year BJS's National Survey of Prosecutors was conducted; the 57% considered-leaving figure is from a separate 2024 NDAA survey of a different, self-selected respondent pool. They are presented together as two independent measurements of the same system, not as a single time-matched dataset. The Shasta County figures describe one office as of May 2026 and are not a national statistic.
Sources
- Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prosecutors in State Courts, 2020 (NCJ 309440, November 2024) — national totals for prosecutor offices, attorneys, non-attorney staff, operating expenditures by jurisdiction size, staffing growth since 1992, and the table 7 policy-coverage rates including the 85.1% caseload-size "no policy" figure. bjs.ojp.gov
- National District Attorneys Association, National Prosecutor Retention Survey (June 2024) — a survey of 4,504 prosecutors fielded March 19–April 12, 2024; the 57% considered-leaving figure and the ranked reasons for leaving (pay, caseload, well-being). ndaa.org
- Shasta Scout, "'Critical' prosecutor shortage at Shasta DA's Office leads to temporary reduction in case filings" (May 12, 2026) — the Shasta County District Attorney's Office staffing numbers and the direct quote from District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett. shastascout.org
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A state prosecutor's office decides who gets charged, what they're charged with, and whether a case goes to trial or gets pled away. It is, by the Bureau of Justice Statistics's own count, a $6.5 billion machine — and the people who run it are leaving. In the most recent national census of the profession, state prosecutor offices reported $6,493,999,970 in operating expenditures in 2020, employing more than 82,000 attorneys and support staff across 2,347 offices. In a separate 2024 survey of 4,504 career prosecutors by the National District Attorneys Association, 57% said they had seriously considered leaving their current employer — and of those, 56% named better pay as a top reason, ahead of heavy caseloads (37%) and their own well-being (42%).