The Jury Wage

The problem

The jury is the one institution of American government to which every citizen is conscripted, and it is the one that pays least. A juror in the federal courts receives $50 a day, rising to $60 after ten days if the judge permits. The median state pays $25. Missouri pays $6, Pennsylvania $9, Alabama and Ohio $10; New York, at $72, is the most generous state in the country and still pays less than half the median daily wage. In most states an employer is not required to pay a worker on jury duty, and many do not. A person earning $200 a day who is summoned for a two-week trial loses $2,000 and is paid $250 for it. Most such people ask to be excused, and most judges, understanding the arithmetic, excuse them.

The result is a jury drawn from the people who can afford to serve. Studies of jury pools find that hardship excusals fall disproportionately on hourly workers, on the self-employed, on parents of young children and on the poor, and that the jurors who remain are older, wealthier, more often retired and less often the peers of the person on trial. The research also finds that this matters: more representative juries deliberate longer, are less likely to presume guilt, and reach verdicts that hold up. The Constitution promises a jury of one's peers. The pay schedule delivers a jury of one's grandparents.

The fix has been tested. When Texas raised juror pay from $6 to $40 a day, studies found the pool became measurably more representative. San Francisco's pilot, paying low-income jurors $100 a day, drew more diverse juries and fewer excusals, and California continued it. Jurisdictions that have tried it have not gone back. The obstacle everywhere else is that jurors do not lobby.

№ 095 and № 096 addressed the two sides of the courtroom. This proposal addresses the twelve people in the box.

The proposal

The Jury Wage: every juror, in federal and state courts, is paid the local median daily wage from the first day of service, on the same day, with employers permitted to offset days they already pay. Child care during service is reimbursed. Hardship excusals are recorded and published by reason. The federal courts pay by statute; the states pay as a condition of federal justice funding, with a federal match for five years.

How it would work

1. The wage. A juror is paid the median daily wage for the county, about $200 in most of the country and more in expensive cities, for every day of service including selection. The rate is published annually from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' wage data. It is paid the day it is earned, by the court, not weeks later by cheque.

1. The employer's offset. An employer who continues a worker's pay during jury service, as some do and a few states require, may claim the juror's wage from the court instead, so that the worker is not paid twice and the employer that does the right thing is not penalised for it.

1. Child care and travel. A juror's child care during service and travel to the courthouse are reimbursed on presentation of the receipt, as they are for federal employees on assignment.

1. Excusals, counted. Every hardship excusal is recorded with its reason, and each court publishes annually how many jurors it excused, for what, and how the pool that remained compared with the county. A court that excuses half its summoned jurors for financial hardship after the wage is paid has something to explain.

1. The states. The wage applies to state courts as a condition of the Byrne and COPS grants of № 056, with the federal government matching half the cost for five years. A state that pays $6 a day and wishes to continue may decline the money.

1. Service, honoured. A juror's service is recorded on the same registry as the Service Dividend of № 005, which counts a year given to the country. Two weeks on a jury is not a year, but it is service, and the country should say so.

The numbers

The jurors. About 32 million Americans are summoned each year and about 1.5 million serve, for an average of about five days.

The cost. 1.5 million jurors, five days, $200 a day: about $1.5 billion a year nationally, less the days employers already pay and offset. The federal courts' share, with about 100,000 jurors a year, is on the order of $100 million.

What it replaces. The current system costs about $200 million a year in juror fees and an unmeasured amount in the earnings of jurors who serve, which is a tax on the conscripted. The Jury Wage moves that tax from the juror to the public, which is where the cost of a public institution belongs.

What Texas and San Francisco found. Texas's increase produced pools closer to the county's demographics in age, income and race. San Francisco's $100 pilot found low-income jurors far more likely to serve rather than seek excusal, and the state legislature funded its continuation on the strength of the result.

The honest objections

"Jury service is a civic duty, not a job, and paying for it cheapens it." Soldiers are paid, and their service is not cheapened. A duty whose cost falls entirely on the person conscripted, and falls hardest on the poorest, is not a civic duty; it is a regressive tax with a moral gloss. Paying the wage makes the duty possible for everyone it is imposed on.

"$1.5 billion a year is a lot for something courts have done for free." Courts have not done it for free; jurors have, and the ones who could not afford to have been excused, which has cost the country the representative jury the Constitution promised. The cost is real and the proposal states it. It is roughly what the country spends on jails for three weeks.

"People will serve for the money and be poor jurors." The people who will serve are the hourly workers, parents and self-employed who today cannot, and the evidence from Texas and San Francisco is that their presence improves deliberation. A jury of people who can afford to lose two weeks' pay is not a better jury; it is a narrower one.

"Employers already pay in many places, and the offset will be gamed." Where employers pay, the offset returns the wage to them and the worker is whole; where they do not, the court pays the worker. An employer that claims the offset without paying the worker is committing wage theft, and № 084 is waiting.

"The states should set their own juror pay." They have, for two centuries, and the median is $25. The condition on federal funds is the same lever № 056, № 058, № 095 and № 096 use, for the same reason: the people the rule protects do not have a lobby in the state capitol.

Sources

• Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Juror Pay, uscourts.gov; 28 U.S.C. § 1871
• National Center for State Courts, State of the State Courts (2023) and state juror compensation survey
• Mary R. Rose et al., "Increasing the Incentive to Serve: The Effects of a Juror Pay Increase in Texas," Behavioral Sciences & the Law (2025)
• Judicial Council of California, Be The Jury pilot evaluation, San Francisco, and Assembly Bill 1981 (2022)
• Anwar, Bayer and Hjalmarsson, "The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials," Quarterly Journal of Economics (2012), on jury composition and verdicts
• Proposals № 005 (The Service Dividend); № 056 (The Clearance Rate); № 084 (The Wage Theft Register); № 095 (The Bail Table); № 096 (The Public Defender Floor)