The U.S. Department of Justice sued the city of San Jose on Wednesday, alleging that the $1,591 fee residents must pay to apply for a concealed carry weapons permit is so high it violates their Second Amendment rights. The lawsuit names both the city of San Jose and the San Jose Police Department as defendants, and it lands just one day after a federal deadline for the city to pause enforcement of the fee came and went.
How San Jose's Fee Got So High
The city council raised the concealed carry application fee to $1,591 through Resolution No. 2026-183; the increase occurred in June and amounted to nearly $300 over the rate set roughly two and a half years earlier, according to USA Carry. State law provides the framework for who can carry, and the city council set the fee through the resolution. Once mandatory psychological evaluations, firearms safety training, Live Scan fingerprinting, and state processing fees are added on top, the total cost for a San Jose applicant to get licensed can exceed $2,000 every two years, per Bearing Arms.
As The Mercury News reports, the lawsuit claims San Jose's fee is the highest in the nation and towers over comparable charges in New York, Boston, and Chicago. The suit argues the fee denies ordinary, law-abiding citizens their right to carry a firearm for self-defense, and DOJ prosecutors wrote that the cost makes exercising Second Amendment rights impractical for middle-class residents and impossible for low-income ones.
A Federal Ultimatum That Ran Out
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon sent a formal pre-suit demand letter on September 9 to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, Police Chief Paul Joseph, and City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood, giving the city until 5 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday to pause fee enforcement and open settlement talks before federal litigation began, according to CAT Outdoors. That deadline passed without a resolution, and the DOJ filed suit the following day. Dhillon said that all law-abiding Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms for self-defense and that the right to bear arms is a fundamental element of the republic, per the same Mercury News report. She also said that charging a fee several times higher than the cost of the firearm itself amounts to an unconstitutional attempt to impede Second Amendment rights.
The complaint, filed as United States v. City of San Jose et al., landed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and was brought by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division Second Amendment Section, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The filing alleges systemic law enforcement misconduct under 34 U.S.C. § 12601, a statute that grants federal authorities power to enjoin police practices that deprive individuals of constitutional rights.
How San Jose Stacks Up Against Its Neighbors
The gap between San Jose's fee and those charged elsewhere in the Bay Area is stark. Santa Clara County charges $976 total, split into $488 upfront and $488 upon issuance, while Alameda County charges $693 total and Berkeley charges $580, made up of $255 at application and $325 upon approval, according to figures released by the DOJ and reported by CAT Outdoors. San Francisco, by contrast, charges just $288, a figure confirmed by The Mercury News.
California Penal Code Section 26190(b)(1) allows city and county licensing authorities to charge fees for concealed carry applications, but the statute explicitly limits those fees to the actual and reasonable costs of processing, issuing, and enforcing the license, according to Justia Law. San Jose's psychological testing requirement for permit applicants, which applicants must pay for themselves, is not mandated under either California law or San Jose's own law, per The Mercury News.
Legal Grounding and a Widening Fight
The DOJ's case rests heavily on the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which affirmed that states may run “shall-issue” licensing systems but warned that exorbitant fees put toward abusive ends violate the Second Amendment by denying ordinary citizens the right to public carry, according to CAT Outdoors. San Jose is not the only Bay Area jurisdiction facing this kind of challenge. In September 2025, the California Rifle & Pistol Association and the Second Amendment Foundation filed a separate suit, Blank v. Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, alleging that county's $976 fee and psychological testing requirement function as an unconstitutional wealth qualification, according to Michel & Associates. The broader fight also includes questions about psychological evaluation rules and permit-processing delays.
The San Jose suit also follows a pattern of increasingly aggressive federal action against California gun permitting practices. In August, the Justice Department settled a lawsuit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department after alleging that processing delays there had denied residents their Second Amendment rights, with the department issuing only two licenses out of nearly 4,000 new applications over a 15-month period, according to the Los Angeles Times. San Jose city officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon, according to The Mercury News, and this remains a developing story.
