The U.S. Supreme Court hears full oral argument and issues signed opinions in roughly 60 to 80 cases each year. In the 2024–2025 term, it handed down about 67 merits rulings.1Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court at Work That is a tiny fraction of what arrives at the Court’s door: between 5,000 and 7,000 new petitions are filed every term, and only about 1 to 2 percent are granted plenary review.
Petitions In, Opinions Out
A Supreme Court term begins the first Monday in October and runs through late June or early July. During that window, thousands of litigants ask the Court to hear their cases, and the Justices agree to full briefing, oral argument, and a signed opinion in about 80 of them.1Supreme Court of the United States. Supreme Court at Work
The count depends on what you mean by “hear.” If you mean the cases the Court decides with a full opinion after argument, the number sits in the 60-to-80 range in most recent terms. If you mean every case the Court acts on in some way, the figure is much higher: the Court also disposes of roughly 100 or more additional cases each term through short unsigned orders or summary reversals, and it handles a large volume of emergency applications on top of that.
The Historical Drop
Today’s docket is smaller than it used to be. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the Court regularly decided 150 or more cases per term. The number of petitions filed has stayed roughly constant since then, so the shrinkage reflects choices by the Justices, not a shortage of work. They have become more selective, not less busy.
Paid Petitions and In Forma Pauperis
The thousands of filings each year split into two lanes. Paid petitions come with a $300 docketing fee and professionally printed booklets.2Legal Information Institute. Supreme Court Rule 38 – Fees In forma pauperis petitions come from litigants — most often prisoners — who cannot afford the fee and file a sworn financial statement instead.3Legal Information Institute. Supreme Court Rule 39 – Proceedings In Forma Pauperis
IFP petitions make up roughly two out of every three filings but are granted far less often. In a typical recent term, paid petitions are granted at about 3 to 5 percent; IFP petitions are granted at about 0.1 percent. Many IFP filings raise issues that do not involve federal law or relitigate settled questions, which explains most of the gap.
Summary Reversals and DIGs
Not every case the Court resolves gets the full treatment. A summary reversal overturns a lower-court decision without briefing or argument, on the view that the error was obvious. During the first fifteen terms under Chief Justice Roberts, the Court averaged about seven summary reversals per term; between 2021 and 2024 that average dropped to just over one.4Columbia Law Review. The Decline of Summary Reversals at the U.S. Supreme Court
Occasionally the Court grants a case and then walks it back. This is called a DIG, short for “dismissed as improvidently granted.” It usually happens after briefing or argument, when the Justices realize the case has a procedural flaw, the issue has shifted, or they cannot agree on how to resolve it. In recent years, the Court has DIG’d two or three cases per term.
Why So Few Get Heard
Almost every case reaches the Supreme Court through a petition for a writ of certiorari, and the Court’s own rules make clear that granting review is discretionary.5Supreme Court of the United States. Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States – Rule 10 Losing below does not entitle anyone to a Supreme Court hearing. The Justices are looking for cases that resolve legal questions affecting the whole country, not cases that fix one bad outcome.
The Cert Pool and the Discuss List
To manage the volume, seven of the nine current Justices participate in a shared cert pool. A single law clerk from one of those seven chambers reviews each petition, writes a memo summarizing it, and recommends whether to take it. Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch handle petitions independently through their own clerks. Petitions that look promising are placed on a “discuss list” for the Justices’ private conference. Cases that don’t make the list are automatically denied. Orders are issued on each Monday the Court sits and posted the same day.6Supreme Court of the United States. Orders of the Court
The Rule of Four
At conference, at least four of the nine Justices must vote to hear a case for certiorari to be granted.7United States Courts. Supreme Court Procedures That threshold is lower than a majority, so a minority of Justices can force a case onto the docket. When a petition fails to get four votes it is denied without explanation, though individual Justices sometimes write short statements dissenting from a denial.
What Catches the Court’s Attention
The strongest signal that the Court will grant review is a circuit split, where different federal appeals courts have reached opposite conclusions on the same legal question. The Court’s rules specifically flag cases where one appeals court has decided an important issue differently from another appeals court or a state supreme court.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC App – Rules of the Supreme Court, Rule 10 The Justices tend to favor “clean” splits where multiple courts analyzed the same legal framework and genuinely disagreed, over “messy” ones where the underlying cases are easy to distinguish on their facts. A split that has persisted for years is more likely to draw a grant than one still developing.
Beyond splits, the Court looks for important questions of federal or constitutional law, or for lower-court decisions so far off that supervisory correction is warranted. Ordinary factual errors in a single case almost never qualify.
The Solicitor General, the federal government’s top advocate before the Court, plays an outsized role in this process. When the Court wants the federal government’s view on a private petition, it issues a “CVSG” order calling for the Solicitor General’s views. Those orders come down about 10 or 11 times per term and signal that a petition has caught the Justices’ serious attention. When the Solicitor General’s own office files a petition, the grant rate is far higher than the baseline.
The Shadow Docket
The 60-to-80 figure counts only merits cases. Alongside that docket, the Court handles a large volume of emergency applications and procedural orders on what has come to be called the shadow docket. These cases skip full briefing and oral argument. Decisions are typically short, sometimes unsigned, and often released with little or no explanation.
Historically, the shadow docket was mostly procedural housekeeping, with a narrow set of genuinely urgent matters like imminent executions. That has changed. During the 2024–2025 term, the Court received over 110 emergency applications between October 2024 and August 2025, with roughly 43 raising substantive issues that warranted immediate action. The volume of government emergency requests has climbed steeply: the second Trump administration filed 19 in its first five months, matching the total the Biden administration filed over four years, while the Obama and George W. Bush administrations combined filed only eight such requests across sixteen years.
So the honest answer to “how many cases does the Supreme Court hear a year” has two layers. Roughly 60 to 80 receive the traditional treatment of full briefing, oral argument, and a signed opinion. On top of that, the Justices act on well over a hundred more cases each term through summary orders and emergency applications, some of which change the law or freeze government policy on a scale that rivals the merits docket itself.