PACER MCP Server

An MCP server for the PACER Case Locator (PCL): live search of US federal court cases and parties across every district, bankruptcy, and appellate court, using your own PACER account. It runs on Apify as a Standby Actor, so there's nothing to install: point your MCP client at the Actor's URL.

PACER bills your account for every search ($0.10 per page of results, capped per search). This is an independent, unofficial integration, not affiliated with the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Tools

Every result includes PCL's paging info (page, total_pages, total_results) and the PACER billing receipt for that search.

Party names can be given as party_name ("Nicholas Henderson", "Henderson, Nicholas", "Lytx Inc"), which is split into last/first name automatically (organisations stay whole), or as explicit last_name / first_name.

Related MCP server: CourtAPI MCP Server

Connect

The MCP endpoint is the Actor's Standby URL plus /mcp (shown in the Actor's Server tab in Apify Console), using the Streamable HTTP transport. Authenticate with your Apify API token:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pacer": {
      "url": "https://<username>--pacer-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}

PACER credentials

Give the server your PACER login in one of two ways. Credentials are never tool arguments, so they never pass through the model.

1. Headers on the MCP connection (best for a shared deployment, since every client brings its own account):

   "headers": {
     "Authorization": "Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>",
     "X-Pacer-Username": "<pacer login>",
     "X-Pacer-Password": "<pacer password>"
   }

   Optional: X-Pacer-Client-Code, X-Pacer-Totp-Secret (accounts with MFA), X-Pacer-Redact-Flag: 1 (filer accounts).

2. Actor input, stored encrypted as secret fields: pacerUsername, pacerPassword, and optionally pacerClientCode, pacerTotpSecret, redactFlag, environment. Save the Actor as a task with this input, turn on Validate and pass Actor input in the task's Standby settings, and connect to the task's URL instead of the Actor's.

Headers win over the Actor input when both are present.

MFA: if your PACER account has multi-factor authentication, provide the base32 secret from your authenticator enrollment as pacerTotpSecret. The server generates the one-time code at each login.

Testing: set environment to qa to use PACER's QA environment (separate QA account, no charges).

How it works

• Logs in to the PACER authentication service (pacer.login.uscourts.gov/services/cso-auth) to get a NextGen token, caches it per account for the life of the Standby run, and logs in again once if PCL answers 401.

• Calls the PCL API (pcl.uscourts.gov/pcl-public-api/rest/cases/find and /parties/find).

• Ends every PACER session when the run shuts down.

• The MCP server is stateless (no MCP sessions), so Apify can scale Standby runs freely.

Development

npm install
npm test

Run the server locally in Standby mode, on http://localhost:4321/mcp:

APIFY_META_ORIGIN=STANDBY ACTOR_WEB_SERVER_PORT=4321 npm start

Deploy with the Apify CLI:

apify login
apify push

Standby mode and the /mcp path are set in .actor/actor.json.

License

MIT