How long federal civil cases take, by district and type of suit

What are these numbers?

Every civil case that reaches a federal district court is reported to the Federal Judicial Center (FJC), which publishes a database with one row per case: the filing date, the type of suit, whether a class action was alleged, whether the plaintiff had no lawyer, the date it ended and how it ended. We count that database by district, type of suit and fiscal year (October to September) and publish only totals, medians and shares. Cases in a multidistrict litigation (MDL) are counted apart, because one MDL can hold hundreds of thousands of cases.

What did we find?

• An MDL case takes about 6 times as long. Cases that carry a multidistrict-litigation docket number had a median of 1,281 days to disposition, against 209 outside an MDL. They were 19.1% of the 934,968 cases filed in fiscal years 2023 to 2025, so they are counted apart here.
• Some kinds of case move fast and some do not. The quickest groups were immigration (86 days), intellectual property (143 days) and civil rights (148 days). The slowest were product liability and mass tort (625 days), medical malpractice (436 days) and Social Security and Medicare (343 days).
• Class actions cluster in a few kinds of case. Securities, antitrust and banking (22.2%), consumer credit and phone-call suits (10.1%) and labor relations and employee benefits (8.8%) lead the groups. By code, Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) (48.2%), Other fraud (29.6%) and Other labor litigation (29.1%) lead.
• Pro se filings are concentrated. Prisoner petitions (90.8%), civil rights (41.5%) and bankruptcy appeals and withdrawals (37.1%) have the highest share of plaintiffs without a lawyer. In personal injury it is 7.4%.
• Personal-injury suits that reach trial wait about 25 months. That is the median from filing to the start of trial for 412 personal-injury trials outside an MDL; the typical personal-injury case is resolved in 325 days, and 1.1% of them go to trial.
• Districts differ. For personal-injury trials over 10 fiscal years, the median wait was shortest in the Eastern District of Virginia (14.4 months) and longest in the Northern District of Illinois (40.3 months). Across all kinds of case outside an MDL, the quickest district was the District of Vermont (75 days).

How have case times changed since fiscal year 2016?

How do federal civil cases end?

Every civil case terminated outside an MDL in fiscal years 2023 to 2025, by how the court recorded its disposition.

“Dismissed as settled” is only the settlements a court records as such. Many settlements show up as a voluntary dismissal, so the share of cases that settle is higher than the first line suggests; the data cannot tell the two apart.

How did we build it?

We downloaded the civil file of the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database (IDB), which holds civil cases filed or terminated since 1988 as reported to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. A script reads its 10,959,535 rows one at a time and counts them; no case-level row, party name, docket number or judge is published. We credit the Federal Judicial Center for the underlying data. We publish fiscal years 2016 to 2025 (October to September); the file’s latest quarter, which does not complete a fiscal year, is left out.

• A median is not a deadline. It is the middle of the cases the court resolved; one case can take far longer or shorter.
• “Resolved” cases. They leave out transfers to another court, remands, transfers into an MDL and statistical closings, because in those the case does not end in that district. Time runs from filing to termination; reopened cases count from their new filing date.
• MDLs are counted apart. Cases with an MDL docket number have their own group and are left out of the kinds of suit and the districts, because an MDL such as the 3M earplug docket holds hundreds of thousands of cases in one district. To see MDLs one by one, see the MDL tracker.
• The class-action and pro se flags are recorded by the court when a case is filed and can change or be wrong; the FJC warns that they have no quality checks. “Pro se” here means the plaintiff has no lawyer.
• We suppress small cells. A share or median over fewer than 10 cases is not published; those over fewer than 30 carry a noise flag in the CSV.
• Counts, not advice. This is not legal advice and not a prediction of how any case will go.

Does it match the U.S. Courts’ own numbers?

For the 12 months to 30 June, we counted the cases the IDB lists as filed and compared them with the “Total U.S. Civil Cases” in the U.S. Courts’ Table C-3 for the same period. They agree within half a percent; the IDB is refreshed each quarter, so it can differ slightly from the earlier table.

The full files, with every district, group and fiscal year and every nature-of-suit code, are listed in the file list.

Where can I read more?

• How many federal civil cases are filed, by type and district: federal civil filings by type.
• Mass-tort dockets, one by one: the MDL tracker.
• The source: the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database and its research guide.
• Court filing statistics: U.S. Courts caseload tables.