Using a FOIA Request to Locate a Person
The answer arrives before the procedure does, so take it first. If the person you are looking for is alive and is not a public official acting officially, a Freedom of Information Act request will almost certainly come back without an address — and the reason is written into the statute rather than left to the mood of a records officer. That is not a discouraging preamble to a how-to. It is the finding. What follows is why the refusal happens, what a refusal letter is still worth, and the narrow set of situations where the request genuinely earns its postage.
Read this before you file
FOIA is an open-government law, not a people-finder. It gives anyone a right of access to federal executive-branch records, and it carries nine exemptions. The sixth one covers personnel, medical and similar files whose disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, which is the category a living person’s address sits in. Your reason for wanting it is not part of the test. The Supreme Court has held that the public interest weighed against privacy is whether the record sheds light on what the agency itself is doing — not on the requester’s need. The Privacy Act then shuts the second door. It bars an agency from disclosing a record about an identified individual without that person’s written consent, and its only mandatory exception is a disclosure FOIA compels. If the exemption applies, FOIA compels nothing, so the Privacy Act prohibits release outright. The request is still not worthless. It works on a person who has died, on a federal employee’s official particulars, on your own file, and as documentary proof that you tried — and knowing which of those you are actually in saves weeks.
Watch: the two statutes that turn a locate request into a refusal
A walkthrough of the exemption, the disclosure bar behind it, and the four situations where the request still pays.
Play the walkthrough
Start with the sentence that decides it
One clause of one subsection accounts for most of the disappointment on this subject. It is worth reading in the original.
The access right itself is generous, and that is what misleads people. Under 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(3)(A), an agency receiving a request that “reasonably describes such records” and is “made in accordance with published rules stating the time, place, fees (if any), and procedures to be followed” must make the records “promptly available to any person.” No standing requirement, no need to explain yourself, no citizenship test. Read that far and a request for someone’s whereabouts looks like a formality.
Then comes subsection (b), which lists nine categories the obligation does not reach. The sixth reads, in full: “personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Twenty-one words, and the load is carried by two of them. Similar files is not a narrow residual category tacked onto personnel and medical records; it is the phrase that pulls in any agency file holding information that identifies a particular person. And clearly unwarranted announces a balancing test, which means the outcome is decided by weighing, not by a rule you can satisfy with better paperwork.
The law-enforcement version is harder still, and the difference is one word
Read paragraph (7)(C) beside it. Records “compiled for law enforcement purposes” may be withheld to the extent production “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Set the two side by side and two changes appear. The word clearly is gone, so the privacy interest does not have to be as strong. And the standard is no longer whether disclosure would invade privacy but whether it could reasonably be expected to, which is a prediction rather than a finding.
That matters for locate work more than it looks, because the files people instinctively reach for — an investigative file, a complaint file, an enforcement docket — are exactly the ones compiled for law enforcement purposes. So the request most likely to name your person is the request governed by the easier withholding standard. People arrive at this discovery in the wrong order, usually after a general request has already been narrowed twice.
What actually comes back
A refusal under these paragraphs is rarely a blank page. Agencies must state the exemption relied on, and the letter typically confirms which office searched, what it searched, and which paragraph it applied. On a well-drawn request you may also learn that responsive records exist. None of that is an address. All of it is information you did not have that morning, and one part of it — the documented fact that you asked the right custodian and were refused — turns out to be the most durable thing the exercise produces.
Your reason for asking is not part of the test
The single most counter-intuitive feature of the statute, and the one that defeats the strongest-sounding requests.
People write the sympathetic letter. The estate cannot close. The child is owed support. The father has never been found. It is a natural instinct and, under this statute, it is weightless — and worse than weightless, because it can convert a neutral request into one that reads as an attempt to reach a private individual.
In Department of Justice v. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 489 U.S. 749, decided March 22, 1989, the Supreme Court held that whether disclosure is “warranted” within the meaning of the privacy exemption “turns upon the nature of the requested document and its relationship to the FOIA’s central purpose of exposing to public scrutiny official information that sheds light on an agency’s performance of its statutory duties, rather than upon the particular purpose for which the document is requested or the identity of the requesting party.” The Court added the sentence that decides most locate requests before they are written: the statutory purpose “is not fostered by disclosure of information about private citizens that is accumulated in various governmental files but that reveals little or nothing about an agency’s own conduct.”
Sit with that. The public interest side of the scale is not your interest. It is the public’s interest in knowing what the government is up to. A private person’s last known address, held by an agency because that person once filed a form, tells the public nothing about the agency. So on the balancing test the disclosure side of the scale is close to empty before the privacy side is even weighed, which is why refusals in this area feel categorical rather than considered.
Why “but it is all public anyway” does not work either
The second argument everyone reaches for is that the facts are already scattered across public records, so compiling them costs no privacy. The same decision anticipates it. The Court described the privacy interest in a government-held compilation as an interest in “practical obscurity” — the protection that comes from information being dispersed and hard to assemble rather than secret. Where the subject is a private citizen and the government holds the material as a compilation “rather than as a record of what the Government is up to,” the Court said the privacy interest is at its apex and the access interest at its nadir.
That reasoning is why an agency will refuse to hand over a consolidated file even where a determined person could rebuild most of it from county offices one at a time. The assembly is the thing being protected. It is also, uncomfortably, an accurate description of the commercial data industry, which exists precisely to defeat practical obscurity for a fee; what that industry holds about an ordinary person is set out in our piece on what data brokers know about you.
The two statutes close the loop
FOIA on its own would leave room to argue. Paired with the Privacy Act it does not, and the Supreme Court has said so.
FOIA compels disclosure. The Privacy Act of 1974, 5 U.S.C. 552a, forbids it. Subsection (b) opens: “No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains,” and then lists twelve exceptions. The second exception is the hinge: disclosure is permitted where it is “required under section 552 of this title” — that is, where FOIA compels it.
Follow the logic all the way round. You ask an agency for a record about a named living person. The record sits in a system of records retrieved by name, so the Privacy Act’s bar applies unless an exception does. The only exception in play is the one for disclosures FOIA requires. But FOIA does not require disclosure of anything covered by an exemption. So the moment the personal-privacy exemption applies, FOIA requires nothing, the exception evaporates, and the Privacy Act does not merely permit the agency to say no — it forbids it from saying yes. There is no discretionary release to appeal to, no supervisor to persuade, no better-worded letter.
The case that settled it, on facts closer to a locate than you would expect
The loop was closed by the Supreme Court in United States Department of Defense v. Federal Labor Relations Authority, 510 U.S. 487, argued November 8, 1993 and decided February 23, 1994. Two unions asked federal agencies for the names and home addresses of employees in the bargaining units they represented. The agencies gave names and work stations and refused the addresses. A federal labor statute appeared to require disclosure, and a court of appeals had agreed, balancing the public interest in effective collective bargaining against the employees’ privacy.
The Court reversed. Because the requester’s particular purpose is irrelevant, the fact that the unions were pursuing the policies of the labor statute counted for nothing in the FOIA analysis; the only public interest that could be weighed was the negligible one in what the addresses revealed about agency conduct. Against that, the employees’ interest in avoiding an influx of mail, calls or visits they had not invited was, in the Court’s word, nontrivial. The privacy interest therefore outweighed the public interest, the exemption applied, FOIA did not require disclosure, “and the Privacy Act prohibits their release.”
Notice what those requesters had going for them. They were the employees’ own certified bargaining representatives. They had a federal statute apparently entitling them to the information. They already held the names, so nothing was being fished for. They still did not get the addresses. A request from a creditor, an heir, a researcher or an estranged family member is standing considerably further back than that.
One definition worth reading before you rely on the Privacy Act yourself
The Privacy Act’s own definitions section narrows it in a way that surprises people who plan to use its access right. Under 552a(a)(2), “individual” means “a citizen of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence.” The right of access at 552a(d)(1) — the right to see your own file and copy it — runs only to a person inside that definition. Someone outside it is left with FOIA and its exemptions when requesting their own records, which is a live issue in immigration matters and a reason to check the status question before choosing which statute to cite on the envelope.
Same request, six subjects, six different answers
Who the record is about changes the outcome far more than how the request is written.
| Who the record is about | What a request realistically returns | The provision doing the work |
|---|---|---|
| A living private individual you want to find | A search confirmation and a withholding citation. Not an address. | 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(6), reinforced by the Privacy Act disclosure bar at 552a(b) |
| A living person named in an investigative file | Generally less than that, and often no acknowledgment of what the file holds | 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(7)(C), which drops “clearly” and asks only what could reasonably be expected |
| A person who has died | Materially more, once death is evidenced — the exemptions protect a personal interest | FOIA.gov instructs requesters to submit proof that the individual is deceased |
| A federal employee, in their official capacity | Name, position titles and series, grades, salary rates, duty stations, position descriptionsThis one works | 5 CFR 293.311(a), which enumerates exactly six categories and stops |
| Yourself | Your own file, after you prove who you are | Privacy Act right of access, 5 U.S.C. 552a(d)(1) |
| A sheriff’s office, county recorder or state motor-vehicle agency | Nothing at all — the request is addressed to the wrong sovereign | The definition of “agency” at 5 U.S.C. 551(1); those bodies answer to state law |
The rows are ordered by how often we see the mistake, not by likelihood of success. Most people who write to us about this have spent their effort on row one and never considered that their question might really be row three or row four, where the same statute behaves completely differently.
What the request genuinely buys you
Five uses that survive everything above. None of them is the one people file for, and two of them are worth the trouble on their own.
1. Confirming federal employment, down to the duty station
This is the strongest and least-known use, and it is not a matter of persuasion — it is written into a regulation. 5 CFR 293.311(a) provides that six categories of information about most present and former federal employees are available to the public: name; present and past position titles and occupational series; present and past grades; present and past annual salary rates, including performance awards, bonuses, merit pay, executive rank awards, allowances and differentials; present and past duty stations, which the rule expressly says “includes room numbers, shop designations, or other identifying information regarding buildings or places of employment”; and position descriptions and job elements, with performance standards released only where they are separable from an actual appraisal.
Six categories, and the sixth is a document rather than a fact about the person. Notice what is not there: no home address, no personal telephone number, no date of birth, no next of kin. The rule takes you to the building the person works in and stops. For service of process, for a subpoena that has to name an employer, or for confirming that the person who claims a federal position holds one, that is frequently enough. The general problem of pinning down where someone works, in and out of government, is worked through in our guide to finding someone’s current employer.
Paragraph (b) is the limit, and it is the one that trips bulk requests. The office will generally not disclose a list of names, titles, grades, salaries or duty stations where the list is selected in a way that would reveal more about the employee than those six items, or where another exemption would protect it. Asking about a named person is a different request from asking for everyone who matches a description, and the second shape is the one that gets refused.
2. A subject who has died
The privacy the exemptions protect belongs to the person the record is about, and death changes the weight of it. FOIA.gov puts the practical instruction plainly: when you request information about another person you will receive greater access “by submitting authorization from that individual permitting the disclosure of the records to you, or by submitting proof that the individual is deceased.” So the request that fails outright on a living subject can succeed on a decedent, which reorders the sequence for estate and beneficiary work — establish the death first, with a certificate, and the federal file that was closed becomes reachable. The wider discipline of identifying and proving up the people entitled to an estate is set out in our estate beneficiary search work.
3. Your own file, which is often where the other person appears
Under the Privacy Act’s access provision at 552a(d)(1), an agency must let you see the records it holds about you and take a copy. People overlook that their own file frequently contains the counterparty: correspondence, a joint application, a claim with two names on it, a case number that opens a court docket. You are not obtaining a third party’s record. You are obtaining yours, which happens to reference them. That is a legitimate route and it fails for the honest reason rather than the frustrating one when the agency redacts the other person’s details out of your copy.
4. A refusal as documentary proof that you looked
Courts asked to authorize alternative service, or to accept that a party cannot be found, want evidence of the attempt rather than assurances. A dated request to a named federal custodian and a dated response citing a withholding provision is exactly that kind of evidence: it names who was asked, what was asked for, when, and what came back. What any particular court requires before it will permit substituted or published service is set by that court and its rules, not by us, and the mechanics of that route are covered in our page on service by publication. The point here is narrower — a refusal letter is a document, and documents are what a diligent-search showing is built from.
5. Records about the agency rather than about the person
The requests that fit FOIA’s design are the ones about government conduct, and some of them help a locate sideways. An agency’s records-retention schedule tells you how long a file you want subpoenaed still exists. Its published procedures tell you which office holds what, so a later request or a court order is addressed correctly. Its contractor lists and program documentation can identify the entity that actually administers a benefit. None of that names your person. All of it shortens the path to the record that does.
The federal relay that used to exist, and no longer does
One route deserves naming because outdated advice still points at it. For nearly seventy years the Social Security Administration would forward a letter to a person it could locate without telling the sender where that person was. It ended. In a notice published at 79 Fed. Reg. 21831 on April 17, 2014, the agency recorded that it had provided the service since 1945, that it was “not a program related activity under the Social Security Act,” and that “the cessation date for letter forwarding services is May 19, 2014.” The notice describes what was lost: humanitarian requests were free, where a person’s health or welfare was at risk or an immediate family member sought to re-establish contact, and monetary requests, where the person was owed something of value, carried a $35 fee in fiscal year 2013. The same notice records that the Internal Revenue Service had eliminated part of its own letter-forwarding workload as of August 31, 2012. The Department of Veterans Affairs operates a separate relay of its own for veterans, which we describe elsewhere; nothing equivalent survives for the general population.
Federal only, and that trips almost everyone
A large share of the requests that go unanswered were never within the statute’s reach to begin with.
“FOIA” has become a generic verb for asking a government body for a record, and the habit costs people weeks. The federal Act reaches federal executive-branch agencies. The definition it builds on, at 5 U.S.C. 551(1), describes an agency as “each authority of the Government of the United States” and then carves four bodies straight out: the Congress; the courts of the United States; the governments of the territories or possessions of the United States; and the government of the District of Columbia. Four exclusions, and each one closes off a route somebody has tried.
Everything a locate normally depends on sits outside that circle. Deeds and mortgages are recorded by a county recorder or register. Marriage, birth and death records are registered by a state or, in several states, by a town or county clerk. Driver and vehicle records belong to a state motor-vehicle agency, and their release is separately restricted. Voter registration, professional licensing, property assessment, jail booking and inmate custody are all state or local functions. Not one of them answers to the federal Act. Each state and the District of Columbia has its own public-records statute, with its own definitions, exemptions, deadlines and fees, and the substantive differences between them are large — some presume openness broadly, some restrict access to residents, and each has a distinct list of what is closed. Our overview of how public records are actually organized follows the custodian rather than the statute, which is the order the work goes in.
The federal courts are worth a separate line because the exclusion surprises people who assume a case file is a government record. Court records are public through the judiciary’s own access rules and the clerk of the court, not through a FOIA request to anybody. Sending a records request to a federal courthouse produces a polite letter and a lost month.
What the timetable actually looks like
Even a correctly addressed request runs on a clock that does not suit a locate. Section 552(a)(6)(A)(i) requires an agency to determine within 20 days, excepting Saturdays, Sundays and legal public holidays, whether it will comply, and to notify you of that determination and its reasons. The statute adds a routing rule: the 20-day period starts when the request reaches the appropriate component of the agency, but in any event no later than ten days after any component designated in the agency’s regulations to receive requests has it. If the answer is adverse, you have a right to appeal to the head of the agency within a period the agency sets that must be not less than 90 days after the adverse determination, and the agency must decide the appeal within twenty such days. If the appeal is denied, judicial review follows.
Those are the statutory periods. Agencies commonly take longer, and a request that has to be transferred between components or referred to another agency for consultation takes longer again. We are giving no processing-time figure here because we have not read a current agency report and will not repeat one we cannot open. The practical point stands regardless: a matter with a hearing date, a filing deadline or a statute of limitations running cannot be built on this timetable.
Six ways a locate-by-FOIA goes wrong
Each of these has arrived at our desk after somebody had already spent months on it.
Writing the sympathetic letter
Explaining why you need the address does not add weight, because the requester’s purpose is not part of the balancing test. It can also mark the request as an attempt to reach a private individual, which is the thing the exemption exists to prevent.
Sending it to a county or a state office
Recorders, registrars, sheriffs and motor-vehicle agencies are not federal agencies. The request has to be made under that state’s own public-records law, which has different deadlines, different exemptions and a different fee schedule.
Requesting a category instead of a record
The statute requires a request that reasonably describes the records sought. “Any information you hold on this person” invites either a fee estimate that ends the project or a refusal, and it forfeits the specificity that makes a partial release possible.
Asking for a list rather than a person
Federal employment particulars are public one named employee at a time. A request shaped as “everyone at this grade in this office” runs into the rule against selected lists and is refused as a whole, taking the answerable part with it.
Filing on a deadline that cannot absorb it
Twenty business days is the determination period, not a delivery promise, and an appeal adds its own cycle. Work that has to be served, filed or heard on a date should not have a records request on its critical path.
Throwing the denial letter away
It is the only durable product of the exercise. It names the custodian, the date, the search and the provision relied on, and that is precisely the shape of evidence a court wants when it is asked to accept that a person could not be found by ordinary means.
How we handle a matter that arrives as a FOIA idea
Four stages. The first one ends the project about a third of the time, which is the point of putting it first.
Decide whether this is even the right door
Is the custodian federal, state or local? Is the subject living or dead? Is this really about a person or about an agency’s process? Most requests are misrouted before they are drafted, and rerouting costs nothing at this stage.
Name the record, not the person
A request that reasonably describes a document an employee could go and find is answerable. A request that describes a human being is not. We work backward from what a specific file is called inside the agency that keeps it.
Run the records work that does not depend on the answer
Property, court, voter, licensing, corporate and licensed identity sources are searched in parallel, on the assumption the request will be refused. In most matters the locate resolves here and the request becomes corroboration rather than the plan.
Keep the paper, whatever it says
The request, the acknowledgment, the determination and the provision cited all go in the file with dates. Where the outcome is that the person cannot be reached through federal records, that conclusion is written down and evidenced rather than asserted.
What this firm is, and the requests it turns down
A page about a law that protects personal privacy is the wrong place to be vague about our own limits.
We are a skip-tracing and public-records research firm, and we are not licensed private investigators — nobody on this team holds that license or claims it. The work is identifying the right custodian, putting the request in under this firm’s own name with the instructing party disclosed, and reading honestly whatever comes back. There is no surveillance in it, no following, no photography. Every matter opens with a purpose the law permits, written down before a search starts — serving process, enforcing a judgment already entered, administering an estate, identifying a beneficiary, satisfying a court’s diligent-search requirement, reconnecting a family where both sides want it. Wanting to know where a particular person lives is not a purpose. A stated reason that does not survive two or three questions ends the conversation, and we say so rather than bank the fee. Records-based tracing across other public sources is set out on our skip-tracing services page.
We do not pretext. Nobody on this team telephones a records officer, a personnel office or a benefits administrator claiming to be an employee, a relative, an attorney or a government official in order to get a file opened. This subject invites it more than most, because the lawful route so often ends in a refusal and the unlawful route is a single phone call away. A refusal we accept is a better outcome than a record obtained by deceit, and it is the only outcome that survives being examined later. The inside of a private financial account is equally off the table. Balances, statements, account numbers, transaction histories: an institution holds those under an obligation to its customer that does not run to us, and the customary way around that obligation is the same deceit this paragraph opened by refusing.
Not a consumer reporting agency
Nothing this firm produces is a consumer report, because People Locator Skip Tracing is not a consumer reporting agency. So do not take a fact traced through this page and use it to settle whether to hire an applicant, whether to rent to one, whether to extend credit or insurance, or whether to grant a license. Congress placed that whole class of decision under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and left it with regulated screening firms, which owe the subject notice, a copy of the file, an adverse-action letter and a route to dispute what is in it. We owe none of that because we take none of that work. The warning belongs here specifically because federal employment particulars are one of the few things a records request reliably produces, and salary and grade history is exactly the material somebody is tempted to use for a hiring or credit decision it was never released for.
Where a records request stops being the right tool
Where a request could be a route to somebody who left, our intake gets harder, not softer. That is not a formality on this page, it is the central risk of the subject. A person who has moved away from a violent household is often deliberately hard to reach, and the paperwork route has an air of legitimacy that a database search does not — a citation, a form, an agency letterhead. Two shapes recur often enough to be worth naming, so that nobody spends an afternoon composing one. The first is the request dressed as procedure: a records inquiry framed around a benefit, a debt or a document, where the only thing actually wanted is where the person went. The second is the request made on behalf of somebody who is not in the room, from a person who cannot say why that individual wants no contact. Where the circumstances point to a protective order, a stalking pattern, a custody dispute being conducted outside a court, or a person who has already said clearly that they do not want to be contacted, we stop. A second version of the same request, tidied up and sent in by somebody else, does not restart it.
If you are the one at risk, the reverse of this page is the useful part. Many states run an Address Confidentiality Program that provides a substitute mailing address for exactly this situation, and your state’s program, a local domestic-violence advocate or the National Domestic Violence Hotline can walk you through it. In an emergency, call 911. We would rather lose the work than be the reason somebody is found.
Everything on this page is general information about a federal statute and is not legal advice. Whether a particular exemption applies to a particular record, whether an appeal is worth taking, and what a court in your jurisdiction requires before it will accept that a person cannot be located are questions for an attorney admitted there. Our end of it is the record and the citation behind it; the legal conclusion is somebody else’s to draw.
Who files these requests, and what for
Six recurring instructing parties, each of whom arrives with the same question and a different deadline.
Pension plan sponsors
Vested participants who stopped answering mail, and a benefit that cannot be paid until they are found.
Class-action administrators
Members entitled to a share who never returned the claim form.
Unclaimed-property holders
Balances heading for escheat unless the owner is found and documented first.
Civil discovery teams
A custodian to subpoena, and a retention schedule that says whether the file still exists.
Federal retirees’ families
A relative’s service history, and the office that still holds the benefit file.
Public-interest researchers
Program conduct rather than participants, which is the request the statute was built for.
The last group is the one the statute was written for, and it is the only one on the list whose requests routinely succeed as filed. Everybody above it is trying to use an open-government law to answer a question about a private person, which is the mismatch this whole page is about. That does not make those requests improper — several of them are made under a legal duty to search — but it does mean the request should be one line of the plan rather than the plan itself.
We will tell you it cannot work before you spend anything on it
Send us the subject, the custodian you had in mind and the deadline you are working to, and you get a straight answer about whether a records request can reach it — including the answer that it cannot, and which route can. Nothing we report is delivered without the record it rests on named beside it. Where the honest finding is that a person is not locatable through the sources we may lawfully use, that is what the report says, with the searches listed underneath. You are not billed for a locate we did not reach.
What people ask before they file
Can I file a FOIA request to get someone’s home address?
Realistically, no, if the person is alive and the address is held as personal information. Exemption 6 at 5 U.S.C. 552(b)(6) covers personnel, medical and similar files whose release would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, and home addresses are the classic case. In Department of Defense v. Federal Labor Relations Authority, 510 U.S. 487 (1994), the Supreme Court held that federal employees’ home addresses were protected by that exemption even from their own certified bargaining representatives, and that because FOIA did not require disclosure, the Privacy Act prohibited release. A better-argued letter does not change that outcome.
Who can make a FOIA request?
Anyone. Section 552(a)(3)(A) directs an agency to make records “promptly available to any person” where the request reasonably describes the records and follows the agency’s published rules on time, place, fees and procedure. There is no citizenship or residency requirement and you do not have to explain why you want the records. That openness is genuine, and it is also why your reason cannot help you: since the statute does not ask for a purpose, it does not weigh one.
What do I need in order to get records about someone else?
One of two things, according to FOIA.gov: authorization signed by that individual permitting disclosure to you, or proof that the individual is deceased. Without one of them, records about another person ordinarily will not be released where disclosure could invade that person’s privacy. That is the whole of the practical guidance the government gives on third-party requests, and it explains why proving a death is often the step that unlocks an estate or beneficiary matter.
What can I ask for under the FOIA that actually helps a locate?
The reliable one is federal employment information. Under 5 CFR 293.311(a), six categories about most present and former federal employees are public: name; present and past position titles and occupational series; present and past grades; present and past annual salary rates; present and past duty stations, including room numbers and building identifiers; and position descriptions and job elements. That confirms whether someone works for the federal government and where they report, and it stops there. Beyond that, requests about an agency’s own procedures, retention schedules and contractors often tell you which custodian to approach next.
How long will it take before I get a response?
The statutory period at 5 U.S.C. 552(a)(6)(A)(i) is 20 days, excepting Saturdays, Sundays and legal public holidays, for the agency to determine whether it will comply and to notify you with reasons. The clock starts when the request reaches the appropriate component, and in any event no later than ten days after a component designated to receive requests has it. That is a determination deadline rather than a delivery promise, and agencies commonly take longer, particularly where a request is referred elsewhere for consultation. We are not quoting an average because we have not read a current agency report.
How much does it cost to make a FOIA request?
There is no single national fee. Section 552(a)(4)(A) directs each agency to publish a fee schedule by regulation, limited to reasonable standard charges for search, duplication and, in some categories, review, with different treatment depending on the requester category and provision for waivers or reductions where disclosure primarily benefits the general public. Because each agency sets its own numbers, we quote none here; check the schedule published by the specific agency in its FOIA regulations before you file, and state a fee limit in the request itself.
How do I file an administrative appeal if I am refused?
Section 552(a)(6)(A)(i) requires the agency, on an adverse determination, to tell you of your right to appeal to the head of the agency within a period the agency sets that must be not less than 90 days from that determination, and of your right to seek assistance from the agency’s FOIA Public Liaison or dispute-resolution services from the Office of Government Information Services. Under (a)(6)(A)(ii) the agency must decide the appeal within twenty days, again excepting weekends and legal public holidays, and if the denial is upheld it must tell you how to seek judicial review. On a personal-privacy withholding an appeal rarely changes the outcome, but it does produce a second dated document.
Does FOIA cover state, county or city records?
No. The federal Act reaches federal executive-branch agencies. The definition it rests on, 5 U.S.C. 551(1), expressly excludes the Congress, the courts of the United States, the governments of the territories or possessions, and the government of the District of Columbia, and it never reached state or local government at all. Deeds, vital records, driver and vehicle records, voter rolls, licensing and jail records are all governed by the public-records statute of the state that holds them, each with its own exemptions, deadlines and fees. Sending a federal-style request to a county recorder produces a delay, not a record.
Tell us who you need to reach, and we will tell you which door opens
Send the name, the last thing you know to be true about the person, the agency or office you were thinking of writing to, and the deadline you are working to. You will get a straight assessment of whether a records request can reach this at all, which custodian is the right one, and what the ordinary public-records route is likely to produce instead — usually within 24 hours, and before any of it costs you. Set out the fact you need on the record and we will say which custodian, if any, is in a position to supply it.
Ask us to run the locate
