Federal lawsuits filed, county by county

What does a record look like?

• United States: 303,716 federal civil cases filed in FY2025 (4.4% more than the 291,016 in FY2024); 3,168,786 in FY2016-FY2025. In FY2025, 244,025 were by plaintiffs in a county of the court's state, 53,776 by plaintiffs outside the court's state (20,762 in a multidistrict litigation), 2,446 outside the U.S., 1,705 under a retired county code and 1,764 with no county recorded.

  Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: Federal Judicial Center, Integrated Database, civil cases (cv88on)

• Texas: 23,344 federal civil cases filed in the state's courts in FY2025 (16.5% more than the 20,035 in FY2024); 200,421 in FY2016-FY2025. In FY2025, 20,911 were by plaintiffs in a county of the state, 2,075 by plaintiffs outside the state (61 in a multidistrict litigation), 358 outside the U.S., 0 under a retired county code and 0 with no county recorded.

  Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: Federal Judicial Center, Integrated Database, civil cases (cv88on)

• California: 37,443 federal civil cases filed in the state's courts in FY2025 (16.6% more than the 32,102 in FY2024); 313,228 in FY2016-FY2025. In FY2025, 31,108 were by plaintiffs in a county of the state, 6,073 by plaintiffs outside the state (292 in a multidistrict litigation), 262 outside the U.S., 0 under a retired county code and 0 with no county recorded.

  Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: Federal Judicial Center, Integrated Database, civil cases (cv88on)

• New York: 22,805 federal civil cases filed in the state's courts in FY2025 (3.1% fewer than the 23,546 in FY2024); 231,297 in FY2016-FY2025. In FY2025, 18,663 were by plaintiffs in a county of the state, 3,746 by plaintiffs outside the state (187 in a multidistrict litigation), 396 outside the U.S., 0 under a retired county code and 0 with no county recorded.

  Status P · checked October 28, 2026 · source: Federal Judicial Center, Integrated Database, civil cases (cv88on)

The full records add the dates, the quoted source text and every field in the CSV and JSON files below.

What are the limits?

• A county here is where the first-listed plaintiff lives, not where the case is heard or where the defendant is. The Federal Judicial Center records the first-listed plaintiff's county; when the United States is the plaintiff it records the first-listed defendant's county, and in land condemnation cases the tract's county. A case with several plaintiffs is counted once, in the first plaintiff's county.
• Many cases cannot be placed in a county of the court's state, and they are shown, never hidden. 'Out of state' (the court's own code) means the first-listed plaintiff lives in the United States but outside the state of the court; 'outside the U.S.' (a separate code) means abroad. Out-of-state cases are a large share of federal filings, and in some years one mass-tort docket makes up most of them (the 3M combat earplug litigation, in one recent year), so every out-of-state row prints its share that sit in a multidistrict litigation. Read these rows before comparing one state or district with another.
• Some courts still write county codes the Census Bureau has since retired. When a retired code has one successor (Dade County became Miami-Dade, Shannon County became Oglala Lakota) its cases are counted in the successor, and that county's record says how many. Connecticut's eight old counties were replaced by planning regions that do not match them one for one, so those cases stay in 'former county' rows, and most Connecticut cases are there. A code that is in no county list at all (one court, the Northern District of Illinois, uses an unlisted code for part of its docket, and the Northern Mariana Islands use another) is shown as 'county not recorded'. A retired-codes row per state lists them all and is not added to the totals.
• These are federal civil cases filed, not state-court lawsuits (which are most lawsuits) and not outcomes. A filing shows where a plaintiff lives and what kind of case was brought; it does not mean a claim has merit, that a lawyer was hired or that anyone won. Criminal cases, bankruptcy cases and cases only in the appeals courts are not in it.
• Case types are the court's nature-of-suit codes, grouped by us into groups plus cases in a multidistrict litigation (MDL), which are their own group because one MDL can hold hundreds of thousands of cases. Practice areas are a crosswalk from those codes: one code can belong to several practice areas and an area can span several codes, so practice figures overlap and are not added to each other. The state and district rows are exact sums of their parts; the practice rollups are not.
• The Federal Judicial Center re-cuts its file every quarter, as cases are reopened or re-coded, so the latest years can move by a fraction of a percent between releases. The national total is checked against the U.S. Courts' Table C-2 for every year, and each district against Table C-3 for the years the Courts publish it in a usable layout; the differences are in the check log and the method notes. The Courts count some case types slightly differently from the Integrated Database, so the two never match to the case.
• Records older than 135 days since their last check are marked stale in the files until we re-check them. Every confirmed error we fix is listed in the data corrections log.

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