The Six-Day Clock Ran Out: Justice Department Sues San Jose and Its Police Department Over Nearly $1,600 Carry Permit Fee It Calls the Highest in the Nation

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

SAN JOSE, CA — The Justice Department filed suit against the City of San Jose and the San Jose Police Department on September 16, 2026, over the nearly $1,600 the city charges for a license to carry a firearm, a fee the Department says is the highest in the nation.

Earlier this month I covered the notice letter in “Constitutional Rights Aren’t for Sale”: Harmeet Dhillon Puts San Jose on a Six-Day Clock Over Its $1,591 Carry Permit Fee, when Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told the city it had until September 15 to say whether it wanted to negotiate before a complaint was filed. What has changed is that the deadline came and went, and the complaint landed the next day.

The Department’s press release does not soften the numbers. It puts San Jose’s application fee at nearly $1,600 per license and says no other jurisdiction in the country charges more. New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, and Chicago, the release says, all charge a small fraction of what San Jose does. Nobody thinks of those four cities as easy places to get a carry license, and San Jose still towers over every one of them.

The legal argument is short. The Department says the Supreme Court has already held that “exorbitant fees” violate the Second Amendment because they deny ordinary citizens their right to carry a firearm for self-defense, and it puts San Jose’s fee squarely in that category. That is the same line the September letter drew from Bruen, the 2022 decision that let states keep their permit systems and charge for them but warned that a fee could not be used to price people out of the right. For readers sorting through California’s concealed carry rules, the license at issue here is the one San Jose issues through its police department, and as I reported in September, the letter’s second claim was aimed at that department because its officers are the ones enforcing the fee schedule. The complaint names both the city and the department.

Dhillon’s statement on the filing did not bother with case citations. “All law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense. This right is not a luxury reserved for a privileged few, but a fundamental element of our republic,” she said. “You don’t need a law degree to recognize that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself is illogical, and an unconstitutional attempt to impede Americans’ Second Amendment rights.”

She is right about the arithmetic. A fee several times the price of the pistol comes due before the applicant has spent anything on the pistol, the holster, or the range time that actually matters. Training and mindset are what make a carrier safe and competent. A fee schedule does neither. It decides who gets in the door based on the size of their bank account.

More from USA Carry:

The suit was brought by the Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section, which the release says enforces the Second Amendment, the Police Pattern or Practice Act at 34 U.S.C. § 12601, and Executive Order 14206. The pattern-or-practice statute is the law that lets the Department sue a police agency over a pattern of violating people’s constitutional rights. The release also invites any gun owner who believes a state or local government has infringed the right to keep or bear arms to file a complaint through the section’s page at justice.gov.

I will continue tracking the Justice Department’s suit against San Jose as it moves forward.