Agencies may charge “reasonable” fees for the “direct” costs of searching for and copying the records you request, unless you are entitled to fee benefits or waivers. (For instance, representatives of the news media do not pay any search fees.) Search fees generally range from $11 to $28 per hour, based on the salary and benefits of the employee doing the search. Fees for computer time, which are described in each agency’s FOI regulations, vary greatly. They may be as high as $270 per hour. Photocopying costs are normally between 3 and 25 cents per page.

Search fees may be charged even if few or no documents are located in response to your request. Unless you are requesting information for a commercial use, agencies may not charge you for the time they spend examining files to determine which individual documents should be exempt from disclosure or for deleting material in those documents. News media requests are not considered “commercial” uses.

Agencies may not require advance payment of any fee under $250 unless the requester has previously failed to make timely payment. However, many agency regulations require that you agree to pay any anticipated fees in excess of $25 before they process your request.

On rare occasions, agencies have “aggregated” multiple requests by a requester or group of related requesters, defining the requests as a single request in order to limit fee benefits. Agency regulations permitting this practice require that the requests clearly be related.

Before making your FOI request, you may want to obtain an estimate of what search and duplication fees might be. In some cases, the agency’s FOI officer can give you this information by telephone. As an alternative, state in your request letter your willingness to pay fees up to a certain limit and ask to be contacted by telephone or letter if the fees are likely to exceed that amount. In this way you can decide how much you are willing to pay. See Sample FOI Act Request Letter, Appendix A.

The FOI Act requires agencies to publish in the Federal Register uniform schedules for search and reproduction fees. You may obtain a fee schedule by contacting the agency FOI officer.

Next section: You may ask for a fee waiver