A federal transcript page sells for $4.40 for 90 days, then $0.10.

Court reporting is sold as a craft career. Two years of steno school, a machine, a state licence, a speed test at 225 words a minute. The price of a transcript is explained as the price of that skill. It is not. The price of a federal transcript is a number the Judicial Conference of the United States writes down, and the only things that move it are how fast you are asked and how many people in the room are buying.

Start with the statute, because it is shorter than anything written about it. 28 U.S.C. § 753(b) says proceedings shall be recorded “by shorthand, mechanical means, electronic sound recording, or any other method, subject to regulations promulgated by the Judicial Conference.” Congress put a tape recorder in the statute in the same breath as a stenographer. Subsection (e) pays the official reporter “an annual salary to be fixed from time to time by the Judicial Conference,” and subsection (f) then lets the same salaried person “charge and collect fees for transcripts requested by the parties, including the United States, at rates prescribed by the court subject to the approval of the Judicial Conference.” One sentence later it closes the only loophole it cares about: “He shall not charge a fee for any copy of a transcript delivered to the clerk for the records of court.” The public’s copy is free. Everyone else’s is priced.

Here is that price list, as Chief Judge Beth Phillips of the Western District of Missouri signed it on 1 October 2024, in the same figures every other district posts because the Judicial Conference sets them nationally. Original, per page: standard within 30 days $4.40; within 14 days $5.10; expedited within 7 days $5.85; within 3 days $6.55; next calendar day $7.30; within 2 hours $8.70. The content is identical in every row. The two-hour page costs 97.73% more than the thirty-day page, which is the clearest statement anywhere that you are not being paid for words.

Now the column nobody reads. Beside the original sits “first copy to each party” at $1.10 a page, and “each additional copy to the same party” at $0.75. The first copy costs the transcriber nothing; the transcript already exists. So one page of one hearing earns $4.40 with a single buyer in the case, $5.50 with two, $7.70 with four and $9.90 with six. The deliverable is not the transcript. The deliverable is the room.

Which turns a $5,000-a-month target into a page count that the number of parties controls. Sixty thousand dollars a year is 13,636.36 ordinary original pages at one buyer — 54.55 pages on each of 250 working days. At four buyers it is 7,792.21 pages, 31.17 a day. Nothing about the work changed. A case with more lawyers in it is worth 75% more per page than a case with one.

And then the schedule misbehaves. Realtime — the unedited draft fed to counsel’s laptop during the proceeding — is priced per page per feed, where the order’s own footnote defines a feed as the data flow to each person or party ordering and receiving it: “one feed, $3.70 per page; two-to-four feeds, $2.55 per page; five or more feeds, $1.80 per page.” Multiply out. Four feeds pay $10.20 a page. Five feeds pay $9.00. The fifth customer takes $1.20 a page, −11.76%, out of the reporter’s pocket, and it takes a sixth feed to get back above where four left off. The page count for $60,000 goes the wrong way with it: 5,882.35 pages at four feeds, 6,666.67 at five, +13.33% more work for the same money because somebody else wanted to buy.

Volume discounts are normal when the seller’s costs fall with scale. Here the seller’s cost does not move at all — the same keystrokes go down the same wire — so the discount is pure transfer from a salaried federal employee to whichever law firms happened to crowd into one case. It is in the schedule because the schedule was written to protect litigants from the reporter, not to pay the reporter for the fifth feed. Nobody re-ran the arithmetic.

Two documents explain why any of this survives. The first is the Judicial Conference’s policy of September 2007, implemented through the Administrative Office’s guidance of 22 February 2008: a filed transcript “will be available at the Clerk’s Office for electronic viewing only, for a period of 90 days,” carrying the header “AVAILABLE AT THE PUBLIC TERMINAL FOR VIEWING ONLY,” while “parties in the case who order the original transcript within the 90-day restriction period will be granted remote access.” Pay and you can read it from your desk. Do not pay and you drive to the courthouse. The second is the Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule, effective 1 January 2020, which puts the transcript on PACER after those 90 days at $0.10 a page, in a line item deliberately separated from the “not to exceed the fee for thirty pages” cap that protects every other document, and then waives everything until an account “accrues charges of more than $30.00 in a quarterly billing cycle.”

Read those two together and the business is visible in outline. A hundred-page hearing transcript is $440.00 inside the window and $10.00 outside it. Three hundred pages a quarter — $1,320.00 of transcript at the capped original rate — is free to any member of the public who waits, because it sits under the $30 waiver. The 90 days is not a privacy measure; the redaction clock inside it runs 7, 21 and 31 days and is finished long before. It is a federally granted exclusive sales window on a public record, and it is the entire asset.

Which raises the only question that matters for $500: who is allowed to sell inside it. The answer is not steno school. Because § 753(b) authorises electronic sound recording, courts that use it buy transcripts from approved outside transcribers, and the application is a page long. The Eastern District of Wisconsin’s bankruptcy court asks the applicant to “be an entity whose transcribers are certified by the American Association of Electronic Reporters and Transcribers (AAERT)” or to “satisfactorily demonstrate an ability to timely transcribe a sample audio recording of a Court proceeding,” marks AAERT certification and web-based ordering as the mandatory items, charges no application fee, and binds the applicant to “per page rates (as set by the Judicial Conference of the United States).” AAERT’s own fee page puts its CET exam at $275, a knowledge retake at $175 and a practical retake at $95, with recertification every three years at $100 for continuous members.

The lists those applications feed are short, and they are lists of names. The Middle District of Alabama’s bankruptcy court posts six approved transcribers: Access Transcripts of Fishers, Indiana; Dipti Patel of Austin, Texas, as an individual; eScribers of Phoenix; J&J Court Transcribers of Hamilton, New Jersey; TheRecordXchange of Scottsdale; and Veritext of Mineola, New York. The Western District of Wisconsin’s posts six as well — the same Access Transcripts and eScribers and J&J, plus Kathleen Price of Stanhope, New Jersey, Janice Russell of Severance, Colorado, and Dipti Patel again, trading there as Liberty Transcripts. Two federal courts fifteen hundred kilometres apart, twelve slots between them, and one person holds a slot in both. The Wisconsin list adds the sentence that prices the slot: “The court reserves the right to increase or further limit the number of transcript service providers on the list.”

The counterweights are three. Guide to Judiciary Policy, Vol. 6, § 530.10 is a ceiling and not a floor — parties, reporters, transcribers and courts “may not negotiate a higher rate without Judicial Conference approval,” while rates may be set lower, so every figure here is the most you can be paid and some districts pay less. Volume is in the court’s gift, not the market’s. And on 2 June 2026 Senators John Kennedy and Ron Wyden reintroduced the Open Courts Act to “remove the paywall for accessing public court records,” a bill their own announcement says would eventually save more than $60 million a year — which would make the 90-day window the only priced window left, and make it worth more rather than less.