The Supreme Court hears oral arguments in roughly 60 cases each year, selected from several thousand petitions asking the justices to review a lower court’s decision. That answers the question most people are asking when they wonder how many cases the Supreme Court hears each year, though the full picture includes a much larger volume of petitions denied, emergency applications resolved on paper, and procedural orders issued without argument.
The Court’s own website still describes the typical workload as “about 70-80 cases” receiving oral argument annually,1Supreme Court of the United States. Oral Arguments a figure repeated for decades. The real numbers have drifted lower. During the October 2023 term, the Court issued 60 signed opinions. The terms immediately before that produced similar totals in the mid-to-high 50s.
Why the Number Keeps Shrinking
In the 1980s, the Court routinely decided over 160 cases per term. The decline began under Chief Justice Rehnquist and has continued under the Roberts Court, which has settled into a baseline of roughly 55 to 65 merits decisions per year.
Two shifts explain most of the drop. Congress eliminated most categories of mandatory appellate jurisdiction in 1988, leaving the justices with near-total discretion over which cases to take. At the same time, the Court has grown more selective, preferring to hear only the disputes it considers most consequential, and fewer unresolved circuit splits in some areas of law have reduced the natural supply of candidates.
How Many Petitions the Court Receives
The 60 or so cases argued each term come from a much larger pile. Historically, the Court received 7,000 to 8,000 petitions for a writ of certiorari each year. That volume has fallen sharply in recent terms, with filings dropping below 4,000 during the 2024–2025 term. Court watchers have noted the decline, but the causes are still being debated.
Petitions divide into two tracks, and the grant rates look nothing alike:
- Paid petitions, which carry a $300 docketing fee and strict formatting requirements, are granted at roughly 14 percent.
- In forma pauperis petitions, filed by people who cannot afford the fee or the printing costs, are granted at under 2 percent. IFP filings have historically made up more than half of the Court’s incoming petitions and are overwhelmingly filed by prisoners without attorneys.
Averaged across both tracks, the acceptance rate sits around 1 to 2 percent of all filings, which places the Court among the most selective institutions in the American legal system.
How the Court Chooses
The Cert Pool
Petitions arrive weekly. Most justices participate in the cert pool, which divides incoming filings among their law clerks. Each clerk reads the assigned petitions, writes a short memo summarizing the issues, and recommends whether the Court should grant review. The memos circulate to all participating justices before their private conference. A few justices opt out and have their own clerks review every petition independently, treating the pool memos as a cross-reference.
The Rule of Four
Granting certiorari does not require a majority. Under the Rule of Four, only four of the nine justices need to vote in favor for a case to be accepted for full review. Once that threshold is met, the lower court is directed to send up the record, and the case moves onto the merits docket for briefing and oral argument. The lower bar exists so that five justices cannot bury a question that four consider important enough to decide.
What Gets Taken
The Court is not an error-correction body. The justices look for disputes with implications beyond the parties in front of them. Three patterns dominate the merits docket:
- Circuit splits, where two or more federal appeals courts have reached opposite conclusions on the same legal question and federal law effectively differs by region. These are the strongest signal.
- Major federal questions involving the Constitution or significant federal statutes, especially where the ruling will affect large populations or shift the relationship between government and citizens.
- Challenges to government power, including disputes over major regulations, executive authority, and the scope of congressional power.
Amicus curiae briefs filed by outside parties also matter at the petition stage. Research covering thousands of petitions found that paid petitions supported by more than one amicus brief at the certiorari stage were granted at roughly a third. The influence of any single amicus brief appears to be shrinking, however, as the overall volume has grown.
The Rest of the Workload
Counting only argued cases undersells what the Court actually does. Through what scholars and journalists call the shadow docket, the justices issue thousands of unsigned orders each year handling procedural matters, emergency applications, and stays of lower court rulings. During the 2024–2025 term, the Court received over 110 emergency applications alone.
Emergency applications typically ask the Court to block a lower court order from taking effect while litigation continues. To win a stay, the applicant generally must show that four justices would likely vote to hear the case on the merits, that irreparable harm would follow without relief, and that the balance of equities favors a pause. The Court sometimes grants or denies these requests with no written explanation, a practice that has drawn criticism from legal scholars and from some justices, who argue that consequential questions should not be resolved without full briefing, argument, and a reasoned opinion.
The Court also disposes of some merits cases without oral argument. In a summary disposition, the justices resolve a dispute on the written briefs and record alone, often reversing or affirming in a brief per curiam opinion that leans on established precedent.
What a Denial Does Not Mean
The gap between petitions filed and cases heard produces one of the most commonly misunderstood facts about the Court. When the justices deny a petition for certiorari, they are not ruling that the lower court was right. A denial carries no precedential value and expresses no view on the merits. It means only that fewer than four justices voted to take the case.
The lower court’s decision stays in effect and remains binding within its jurisdiction. A federal appeals court ruling left undisturbed by a cert denial still controls that circuit, but it does not become national law and the Supreme Court has not endorsed its reasoning. The justices may pass on a case for any number of reasons: procedural problems, an unclear record, a preference for letting an issue develop further in lower courts, or simple timing. The right way to read a denial is “not now,” nothing more.
A Note on Original Jurisdiction
Nearly every case the Court decides arrives on appeal, but Article III also gives the Court original jurisdiction over a narrow set of disputes, meaning it acts as the trial court rather than a reviewing one. These are cases involving ambassadors and other foreign diplomats, and disputes between states. They are rare: since 1960, the Court has received fewer than 140 motions to file original jurisdiction cases, denying a hearing in nearly half of them. The ones that proceed usually involve state boundary lines or water rights and do not meaningfully change the annual case count.