Federal sentences for the same charge vary widely depending on the district, the facts of the case, and the judge who imposes them.
Across fiscal years 2021 through 2025, fewer than half of all federal sentences landed inside the calculated guideline range.
The Federal Sentencing Explorer below shows what actually happened to people sentenced in federal court whose cases looked like yours, using individual case records from the U.S. Sentencing Commission covering all 94 federal districts.
Start by answering the questions in the tool.
Below it, you will find an explanation of where the numbers come from, why results differ between the four federal districts in Texas, and what the data cannot tell you about your own case.
Guideline calculators produce a recommended range, not an outcome, and in a large share of federal cases the sentence imposed falls outside that range.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s own figures show the gap clearly.
Within-range sentencing fell to 42.8 percent of cases in fiscal year 2021 and 41.9 percent in fiscal year 2022, recovering to 51.5 percent in fiscal year 2025.
Averaged across those five years, roughly 45 percent of federal sentences fell inside the guideline range.
The rest landed somewhere else, usually below it.
That happens because the federal sentencing guidelines have been advisory rather than binding since the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in United States v. Booker, which severed the statutory provision requiring judges to sentence within the range.
A judge must calculate the range correctly and consider it, but the sentence actually imposed is shaped by cooperation, mandatory minimums, the strength of the mitigation presented, and the sentencing practices of that particular courthouse.
A number produced by a grid tells you where the conversation starts.
It does not tell you where it ends.
The Federal Sentencing Explorer matches the facts you enter against individual federal sentencing records and shows you the sentences that real people received in comparable cases.
It draws on 313,888 individual case records from U.S. Sentencing Commission data covering fiscal years 2021 through 2025.
Rather than applying a formula, it filters that pool down to the cases that genuinely resemble yours and reports what happened in those cases.
The tool asks the questions a federal defense lawyer would ask when assessing exposure in a new case.
Those questions cover the type of charge, the federal district where the case is pending, criminal history, whether the case resolved by plea or by trial, whether the person cooperated, and whether a mandatory minimum applies.
Depending on the charge type, it asks up to eight further questions specific to that kind of case, because the factors that move a drug sentence are not the factors that move a fraud sentence.
Plea cases are never grouped with trial cases, and mandatory minimums are applied automatically where they apply.
The more accurately you can answer, the closer the matched group will be to your situation.
The results show the typical sentence in the matched group, the middle range those sentences fell into, how often sentences came in below or inside the guideline range, and the number of cases the answer is based on.
That last figure matters as much as the sentence numbers themselves.
A result built on 400 comparable cases carries more weight than one built on nine, and the tool tells you which one you are looking at rather than presenting both with equal confidence.
Where there are enough comparable cases in your district, it reports district-level results instead of national ones.
Where there are not, it says so.
Judges in different federal districts apply the same guidelines at very different rates, which is why the district a case is filed in changes what a realistic outcome looks like.
Nationally, 31.2 percent of federal sentences in fiscal year 2025 were variances, meaning the judge sentenced outside the range under the statutory sentencing factors rather than under a departure provision in the guidelines themselves, and that rate is not spread evenly across the country.
The four federal districts in Texas show how wide the spread gets inside a single state.
The table below compares how often judges in each Texas district sentenced inside the guideline range in fiscal year 2025, and how often they went below or above it.
| Texas district | Cases sentenced | Within guideline range | Downward variance | Upward departure or variance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northern (Dallas, Fort Worth, Amarillo, Lubbock) | 1,386 | 67.8% | 15.9% | 6.1% |
| Eastern (Plano, Sherman, Tyler, Beaumont) | 1,015 | 59.6% | 27.0% | 5.9% |
| Southern (Houston, Laredo, McAllen, Corpus Christi) | 7,545 | 69.6% | 17.3% | 1.4% |
| Western (Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Waco) | 10,416 | 76.4% | 6.7% | 14.4% |
Sources: U.S. Sentencing Commission District at a Glance reports for the Northern, Eastern, Southern, and Western Districts of Texas, fiscal year 2025.
Two contrasts stand out.
Judges in the Eastern District went below the guideline range by variance in 27.0 percent of cases, more than four times the rate in the Western District at 6.7 percent.
Judges in the Western District went above the range in 14.4 percent of cases, ten times the rate in the Southern District at 1.4 percent.
The same conduct, charged under the same statute, meets a different sentencing culture depending on which courthouse the case lands in.
This is also why a national average can be misleading.
The Southern and Western Districts handle enormous immigration caseloads, which made up 80.2 percent and 75.9 percent of their fiscal year 2025 sentencings respectively, and those cases pull the district-wide averages down sharply.
Comparing districts fairly means comparing the same type of charge, which is what the tool does.
Across the country in fiscal year 2025, the median federal drug trafficking sentence was 70 months and the median fraud, theft, and embezzlement sentence was 12 months.
Those national medians are the midpoint of a very wide distribution, and individual districts sit a long way from them in both directions.
Federal drug trafficking sentences in the four Texas districts ranged from a median of 60 months in the Southern District to 120 months in the Northern District, a difference of five years for the same broad category of offense.
The Eastern District median was 108 months and the Western District median was 70 months, matching the national figure exactly.
Fraud cases diverge from the national picture even more sharply.
Median fraud, theft, and embezzlement sentences in fiscal year 2025 were 48 months in the Northern District, 46 months in the Eastern District, 37 months in the Western District, and 36 months in the Southern District, every one of them several times the national median of 12 months.
The data shows that gap but does not explain it.
What it does establish is that a national median is a poor guide to what happens in any particular courthouse.
These are figures across whole offense categories, which is why they are a starting point rather than an answer.
The tool narrows them down to the specific circumstances you enter.
The tool shows you what happened in past cases, and past outcomes are not a forecast of what will happen in yours.
Sentencing turns on facts no dataset captures: the quality of the mitigating factors presented, what the presentence report says, how disputed sentencing enhancements are resolved, the particular judge, and the arguments made on the day.
Two people with identical records and identical charges can receive very different sentences for reasons that never appear in a statistical field.
There are also structural limits worth knowing about.
The data reflects sentences already imposed, so recent changes in charging policy or guideline amendments may not yet be visible in the numbers.
Matching groups get smaller as you add detail, and a small group is a weaker basis for any conclusion.
The tool reports group sizes for that reason, and you should treat a result drawn from a handful of cases with real caution.
The tool covers federal cases only, so it will not tell you anything about a Texas state charge.
For a state drug case, use the Texas drug offense sentencing calculator instead.
These are sentences imposed in past federal cases, taken from U.S. Sentencing Commission records. They are not a prediction of any individual sentence and are not legal advice. Every case depends on its own facts, the judge, and the arguments made. Talk with a federal criminal defense lawyer about your case.
General AI tools answer sentencing questions from published summaries: national averages, district-wide statistics, news coverage, and law firm articles.
They do not query the Commission’s individual case records and filter them down to one person’s circumstances, because they do not have those records organized in a form that allows it.
Doing that requires hundreds of thousands of individual sentencing records, structured so they can be matched across dozens of legal factors, plus the judgment to decide which cases are genuinely comparable and which only look similar.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s own Judiciary Sentencing Information platform, built for federal judges, matches on three criteria: the primary sentencing guideline, the final offense level, and the criminal history category.
It also excludes substantial assistance cases from most of its calculations and reports nothing at all when fewer than three offenders meet the selected criteria.
The Federal Sentencing Explorer was built to go further than a three-factor match, and to do it in plain language rather than requiring you to know your own offense level before you start.
The numbers in this tool describe what has happened to other people, and what happens in your case depends on decisions that have not been made yet.
As a federal criminal defense attorney in Dallas, Michael Lowe can review your charges, the discovery, and the sentencing exposure you are actually facing, and explain where the real leverage is.
Contact the Law Office of Michael Lowe today by calling (214) 526-1900.
No. The tool reports sentences imposed in past federal cases with similar facts, drawn from U.S. Sentencing Commission records. It is a picture of how comparable cases have been resolved, not a forecast. Your sentence depends on your judge, your presentence report, how disputed issues are resolved, and the arguments your lawyer makes at sentencing.
The results come from individual case records published by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, covering 313,888 federal sentencings across fiscal years 2021 through 2025. Federal courts are required to report sentencing documents to the Commission, which codes and publishes the data. These are government records of actual sentences, not estimates or figures compiled by a law firm.
Because districts sentence differently. In fiscal year 2025, Eastern District of Texas judges varied below the guideline range in 27.0 percent of cases, while Western District judges did so in 6.7 percent and went above the range in 14.4 percent. The same charge meets a different sentencing culture depending on where the case is filed.
Treat it carefully. The tool always reports how many comparable cases an answer is built on, and it warns you when that group is small. A result drawn from several hundred cases describes a real pattern. A result drawn from five cases describes five people, and one unusual outcome among them can move the figure significantly.
No personal information is saved on our website. What you type is sent to the AI service that runs the chat so it can write a reply, and the conversation disappears when you close the page. To check that the tool is working correctly, the site keeps an anonymous record of the case details the tool used, such as the district, the statute, and answers like criminal history or whether the case went to trial. That record contains no names, nothing you typed, and no IP address, and it is deleted after 90 days. Using this tool does not make you a client of the firm, so please do not enter names or other details that could identify you or anyone else.
