Illinois · Public Act 104-0683
Illinois will require employers to pay jurors.
The work lands on jury commissions.
On July 31, 2026, Public Act 104-0683 was signed into law. Effective January 1, 2027, it amends both the Illinois Jury Act and the Jury Commission Act to require employers with more than twenty-five employees to compensate employees at their regular rate of pay for time spent serving on a jury. The obligation falls on employers. The operational consequences fall on the people who administer juries.
Most of the coverage has framed this as an employment law change, which it is. But a statute that removes a significant financial disincentive to jury service changes juror behavior, and juror behavior is what jury administration is built on. Response rates, appearance rates, hardship excusals, and documentation volume are all downstream of the decision a summoned citizen makes about whether serving is affordable.
This is a plain reading of what is likely to change operationally, and what a jury commission can reasonably do about it before January. It is written for court administrators and jury commissioners, not for lawyers, and it is not legal advice.
What the Act Does
The change in one paragraph.
Illinois already prohibited employers from penalizing employees for jury service. Public Act 104-0683 goes further: covered employers must now pay wages during that service. The threshold is more than twenty-five employees, which captures a large share of the Illinois workforce while exempting small businesses. It takes effect January 1, 2027, and it amends both the Jury Act, which governs most counties, and the Jury Commission Act, under which counties with jury commissioners operate.
Operational Consequences
Four things that are likely to change.
None of these is catastrophic. All of them are easier to plan for in the fall than to absorb in January.
Yield
Response and appearance rates may shift
Every jury commission sizes its summons volume against historical yield: the share of summonses that produce a juror standing in the assembly room. Those rates encode, among other things, how many people conclude they cannot afford to serve. Removing that barrier for employees of covered employers should push appearance rates up.
That sounds like good news, and mostly it is. But yield assumptions that are too low produce over-summoning, which means more citizens inconvenienced, more jurors sent home unused, and higher per diem cost for the county. A commission that summons on last year’s numbers may find itself with a materially larger pool than it needs.
The practical step is to know your current rates by geography and by employer concentration before the statute takes effect, so that you have a baseline to measure the change against. If you cannot currently report appearance rate by ZIP code or by summons batch, that is worth solving in the fall.
Excusals
Financial hardship claims will change character
Financial hardship is one of the most common excusal grounds, and for employees of covered employers the underlying basis largely disappears on January 1. Expect the volume of those requests to fall.
What remains will be different in kind rather than simply fewer: the self-employed, gig and contract workers, part-time employees, and employees of businesses under the twenty-five-employee threshold. Those are harder cases to evaluate, and they are less likely to be resolvable with a simple employer letter.
Commissions that use hardship excusal reason codes may find their existing categories too coarse to be useful after January. Splitting financial hardship into employer-covered and not-employer-covered, before the change rather than after, preserves the ability to see what actually happened.
Documentation
Proof-of-service demand will climb sharply
This is the consequence most likely to be underestimated. An employee who must be paid for jury service needs to prove to their employer that they served, and for how long. Every one of those employees becomes a request for documentation.
Courts that issue proof of service on request, by hand, at the counter or by telephone, are looking at a volume increase that scales with appearance rate. If a commission summons several thousand jurors a year and a large share of them are now employed by covered employers, the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly.
The durable answer is self-service: let jurors download or print proof of service themselves, without staff involvement, ideally from the same portal they use to check reporting status. That is worth having in place before January rather than building it in response to a queue.
Juror pay
Fee waiver behavior may change
Illinois pays jurors a statutory per diem, and many jurisdictions allow jurors to waive or donate it. A juror who is already receiving full wages from an employer may be more inclined to waive the county’s fee, or may simply not think about it.
The effect on county juror pay budgets is real but hard to predict, and it cuts both ways: higher appearance rates increase total per diem owed, while higher waiver rates reduce it. Commissions that can report waiver rate as a distinct measure will be able to answer the county board’s questions in the spring. Those that cannot will be guessing.
Illinois Is Not First
Nine jurisdictions already do this.
It is worth knowing that Illinois is joining a group rather than breaking new ground. Roughly ten jurisdictions already require employers to continue paying wages during jury service, and courts in those states have already lived through the operational effects described above.
| Jurisdiction | Employer wage obligation |
|---|---|
| Tennessee | Regular wages, up to 10 days of service — the most demanding in the country |
| District of Columbia | Full wages for the first 5 days |
| New York | Employers with more than 10 employees, first 3 days, at the $72 daily rate |
| Alabama | Usual wages for full-time employees |
| Colorado | Regular wages for the first 3 days, subject to a daily cap |
| Connecticut | Regular wages for the first 5 days |
| Massachusetts | Regular wages for the first 3 days |
| Louisiana | One day of regular wages |
| Nebraska | Regular wages, less any jury fee received |
| Illinois (Jan 1, 2027) | Regular wages, employers over 25 employees |
Thresholds, durations, and offset rules vary considerably between these states. Verify the current text of any statute before relying on it — this table is a general orientation, not a compliance reference.
The Closest Precedent
New York changed its rules eighteen months ago.
Of the recent changes, New York’s is the most instructive for Illinois. Through the fiscal year 2025–2026 budget signed in May 2025, the legislature amended Sections 519 and 521 of the Judiciary Law to raise the daily juror rate from $40 to $72 — the first increase in roughly two decades — effective June 8, 2025. Employers with more than ten employees pay that rate for the first three days; the state covers the fee for employees of smaller employers so that no juror falls below the threshold.
The stated legislative rationale is the part Illinois commissions should notice. The bill’s sponsor memo argued that food, transportation, parking, and other costs had made jury service economically unfeasible for many citizens, and that raising compensation would produce — in the legislature’s own words — a more willing jury pool.
That is an explicit prediction that response and appearance behavior would change. New York has now had roughly eighteen months of operating experience under it. Any Illinois commission planning for January would do well to ask counterparts in New York what actually happened to their yield, their hardship excusals, and their documentation volume — because that is the closest thing available to a controlled preview of 2027.
What To Do Before January
The fall is the cheap time to prepare.
Four things a commission can do now, none of which require new software, and all of which are harder once the change is live.
- Establish a baseline. Record current response rate, appearance rate, hardship excusal rate, and fee waiver rate before January 1. Without a before, you cannot measure the after, and the county board will ask.
- Split your hardship reason codes. Distinguish financial hardship claims from employees of covered employers from everything else, so the composition change is visible in your own reporting.
- Solve proof of service before you need to. Whatever the mechanism — portal download, automated email, printed at check-out — decide now how a juror gets documentation without a staff member touching it.
- Revisit summons sizing in the first quarter. Do not wait a full year to adjust. If appearance rates move, the sooner your volumes track them, the fewer citizens are summoned unnecessarily.
A Note on Systems
Configuration, not development.
The reason this change is worth writing about is that most of what it requires is configuration rather than software development: reason codes, documentation templates, per diem and waiver rules, and reporting definitions. A jury management system that treats those as data can adapt in an afternoon. One that treats them as code requires a release, a vendor ticket, and a wait.
That distinction matters more in a year when a statute changes than in a year when nothing does. If your current system requires a development request to add an excusal reason code or revise a proof-of-service document, January is a reasonable time to find that out — but a poor time to discover it.
For more on why jury administration is unlike other court functions, see why jury management is different. Texas courts face a different pressure — see why juror pay is a county budget problem in Texas.
This is not legal advice. Public Act 104-0683 is summarized here for operational planning purposes only. Courts should rely on their own counsel and on guidance from the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts for the authoritative reading, and should confirm the statutory text directly.
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