Data sources
United States Sentencing Commission, Individual Offender Datafiles
https://www.ussc.gov/research/datafiles/commission-datafiles. One file per fiscal year, published by the Commission as SAS, SPSS, Stata and (from FY2012) CSV. The files contain every case the Commission received with sentencing documents in the year, coded into more than 20,000 variables. They are works of the United States government and are in the public domain (17 U.S.C. §105). The Commission does not endorse this site.
| Fiscal year | Cases in file | File date | File |
|---|---|---|---|
| FY2018 | 69,425 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy18nid_csv.zip |
| FY2019 | 76,538 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy19nid_csv.zip |
| FY2020 | 64,565 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy20nid_csv.zip |
| FY2021 | 57,287 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy21nid_csv.zip |
| FY2022 | 64,142 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy22nid_csv.zip |
| FY2023 | 64,124 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy23nid_csv.zip |
| FY2024 | 61,678 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy24nid_csv.zip |
| FY2025 | 66,662 | 29 Apr 2026 | opafy25nid_csv.zip |
Variables used: CIRCDIST (district), MONCIRC (circuit), OFFGUIDE (primary offence type), GDLINEHI (primary guideline), XCRHISSR (criminal history category), XFOLSOR (final offence level), SENTTCAP (capped prison months), SENTRNGE (position relative to the guideline range) and SENTIMP (type of sentence). No other field is read past the parser, and the case identifier USSCIDN is never stored.
Variable Codebook for Individual Offenders
USSC Public Release Codebook, FY1999–FY2025 (revised 7 April 2026). Every value label on this site (district names, offence types, range-status categories, sentence types) is transcribed from it.
Freshness
The Commission's annual datafile for a fiscal year is published the following spring; the newest here is FY2025, dated 29 Apr 2026. The Commission also publishes quarterly sentencing updates, the latest covering the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 (checked 30 Sep 2026); those preliminary figures are not part of this site.
Not used
The Commission's Sourcebook tables are used only as a cross-check of totals and are not reproduced. No court records, dockets, opinions or case-level sources are used.