Data Study
Federal Sentencing: Key Statistics
The headline numbers from the U.S. Sentencing Commission's case-level data, computed across the full FY2015–FY2024 corpus. Free to cite and link (CC0).
- 661,705
- Cases analyzed
- 90
- Federal districts
- FY2015–2024
- Period
Key findings
Each figure is computed live from the USSC datafiles. Sentence-length variation reflects each district's offense mix, not a measure of court severity.
- 18,487 cases involved immigration, the most common offense type in the latest year - immigration cases, averaging 12.5 months.
- 137 mo the longest average sentence of any district (the Middle Tennessee District, 328 cases) - a reflection of its offense mix, not a measure of court severity.
- 661,705 federal sentences analyzed: every USSC individual-offender record from FY2015 to FY2024, across 90 districts.
- 57.7 mo the average federal prison sentence in FY2024 (61,546 cases).
- 43% of FY2024 sentences fell within the advisory guideline range; most fell below it (51.7% below, 5.4% above).
- +14% change in the average sentence over the decade, from 50.5 months in FY2015 to 57.7 in FY2024.
- 89.1% of FY2024 cases resulted in a term of imprisonment.
- 72.1% of FY2024 cases were resolved by a guilty plea.
Source: United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) Individual Offender Datafiles · FY2015–FY2024 Figures computed by PlainSentencing from the public-use datafiles. These statistics are released to the public domain (CC0): free to cite, quote, and republish with attribution to PlainSentencing.
Open data: download the per-district dataset as CSV (90 districts) - CC0, free to reuse with attribution.
See the methodology for how each figure is computed, or explore the data by district, offense, and ranking.