LSAC Credential Assembly Service: Costs, Requirements, and GPA

The LSAC Credential Assembly Service, known as CAS, is the standardized document service every ABA-approved law school requires applicants to use. It costs $215 for a five-year subscription plus $45 for each law school report, and it collects your transcripts, letters of recommendation, and LSAT scores into a single file that LSAC delivers electronically to each school you apply to.¹ There’s no opting out if you’re applying to an ABA-approved program.

What CAS Costs

The $215 subscription keeps your account active for five years from the date you register.² If you end up applying across more than one admissions cycle, you won’t pay the base fee again as long as the subscription is still current.

Each law school you apply to then requires its own CAS Report at $45.⁴ Be reasonably certain you’re going to apply before you register, because that money is gone.

Budget separately for official transcripts from your undergraduate institutions, which typically run $5 to $25 per school depending on the registrar and delivery method. If you attended more than one college, those costs stack.

Fee Waivers

LSAC runs a two-tier fee waiver program tied to household income relative to federal poverty guidelines. In 2025, the poverty guideline for a single person in the 48 contiguous states is $15,650 per year.⁵ LSAC uses multiples of that figure, with different thresholds for independent applicants and those still claimed as a dependent.

The two tiers offer different levels of CAS coverage:⁶

Tier 1 covers a five-year CAS subscription and six CAS Reports. Independent applicants qualify with income up to 235% of the poverty guidelines; dependent applicants have lower individual thresholds but also factor in parental income.
Tier 2 covers a five-year CAS subscription and three CAS Reports, with income ceilings slightly above the Tier 1 ranges.

A few rules worth knowing. Waivers aren’t retroactive, so fees you’ve already paid won’t be refunded if you’re approved later. To unlock the CAS portion of the benefit, you have to complete a free course called “How Do I Apply to Law School?” on LawHub. And once you’re conditionally approved, you have two years to redeem the CAS subscription and reports.⁶ LSAC reviews applications on a rolling basis and recommends submitting yours at least six months before you plan to register for the LSAT.

What You Need to Submit

Your CAS file has three parts: transcripts, letters of recommendation, and your LSAT score. The LSAT score flows in automatically after your test date. The other two take real time and effort on your part.

Transcripts

You need an official transcript from every college or university where you’ve taken courses after high school. That includes community colleges, study-abroad programs, and graduate schools. Each institution must send the transcript directly to LSAC; anything you send yourself won’t be accepted.⁷

The process starts inside your LSAC account, where you generate a Transcript Request Form for each school. The form carries a unique barcode that links the incoming document to your account. You send the form to the registrar, who processes it through their own ordering system. Registrars can take several weeks, especially in fall and early winter. LSAC itself needs about two weeks to process each transcript after it arrives.⁷

Letters of Recommendation

LSAC’s letter service lets each recommender submit once, after which LSAC distributes copies to whichever schools you designate.⁸ You add each recommender’s contact information in your account, and LSAC emails them upload instructions. Paper submissions are allowed, but the recommender needs a printed LOR Form from your account to accompany the letter.

You decide which letters go to which schools, and you can reassign them later. Pay attention to this step. A letter that sits in your file without being explicitly assigned to a school will not be sent. Most ABA-approved schools accept the LSAC letter service, though a few have their own preferred process.⁸

LSAT Scores

Your LSAT score is pulled into your CAS file automatically once it’s released. You don’t need to request score delivery or pay for score reports. Take the test more than once and every score appears in your file.

How LSAC Recalculates Your GPA

This is where CAS catches many applicants off guard. LSAC doesn’t just pass along the GPA your university calculated. It recalculates your grades using its own conversion table, and the result can differ meaningfully from what’s on your transcript.

The biggest single difference: LSAC assigns an A+ a value of 4.33, not 4.0.⁹ If your school awarded A-plus grades and you earned several, your LSAC GPA may come out noticeably higher than your transcript GPA. The full scale runs from 4.33 for an A+ down to 0.00 for an E or F, with every plus and minus grade carrying its own value.

LSAC also includes every course that can be converted to the 4.0 scale, even when your school excluded certain grades from its own calculation.⁹ Two rules surprise people most often:

If you retook a class and your school replaced the original grade, LSAC still counts both grades. As long as the course units and original grade appear on the transcript, both factor into your LSAC GPA.
Passing grades from pass/fail, satisfactory/unsatisfactory, or credit/no-credit systems are excluded from the GPA calculation. The credits appear on your report as “unconverted credits” but don’t move the number.

Pull your transcripts and run the numbers yourself before you register. If your school used grade replacement for repeated courses, your LSAC GPA will likely be lower than the one on your transcript. If you earned A-plus grades at a school that capped them at 4.0, it will likely be higher.

What Law Schools Receive

When you submit an application and pay the $45 report fee, LSAC sends an electronic CAS Report to that school’s admissions office. The report bundles your Academic Summary Report, all LSAT scores, the recommendation letters you assigned to that school, and your electronic application.¹

The Academic Summary Report is the centerpiece. It includes your cumulative LSAC GPA, a year-by-year GPA breakdown for each undergraduate institution, and a cumulative GPA across all schools.¹⁰ It also shows how you compare to other LSAC registrants from the same undergraduate school, including a GPA percentile rank and a distribution of LSAT scores from your institution’s graduates. That comparison data requires a minimum number of candidates from your school in the LSAC database to generate.

You can track delivery through your account dashboard, which shows when each school has downloaded your file. If you complete a new semester after a report has gone out, submit an updated transcript. LSAC will generate a revised Academic Summary Report and forward it to every school that previously received your report, provided their admissions terms are still active.⁷

International Applicants

If you earned your bachelor’s degree outside the United States, its territories, or Canada, or if you completed more than one year of study at an international institution, your transcripts go through an additional evaluation.¹¹ The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) handles the evaluation through LSAC, translating your international credits and degree into U.S. equivalents. The evaluation is included in the $215 CAS subscription.¹

Document requirements are stricter than for domestic transcripts. Your international institution must send records directly to LSAC in a sealed envelope bearing the institution’s official stamp or seal across the flap. Documents sent by the student, or loose inside an express mailer, are rejected. If the institution issues only one original transcript to the student, LSAC will accept an institution-certified true copy.¹¹

All records must be submitted in the original language. If that language isn’t English, you also need a literal, line-by-line English translation. Build in extra time: after LSAC processes the transcripts, the AACRAO evaluation takes at least an additional two weeks.¹¹

When to Register

LSAC recommends registering for CAS at least four to six weeks before your first law school application deadline.¹ That’s the floor. Starting earlier is better, because the timeline depends on other organizations working on their own schedules.

Here’s where time typically goes. Your registrar may need one to three weeks to process a transcript request. LSAC takes about two weeks to process each transcript after receipt. Recommenders need time to write and upload. If anything gets lost or mismatched, that clock starts over. International applicants add the AACRAO evaluation on top.

If you’re applying to schools with deadlines in late November or early January, registering for CAS by mid-September gives you a reasonable buffer. Your file won’t be marked complete until every transcript has been received and processed and your recommenders have submitted their letters, and law schools generally won’t review an incomplete file.

1
Law School Admission Council. Credential Assembly Service (CAS)
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Law School Admission Council. LSAT and CAS Fees
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Law School Admission Council. LSAT and CAS Fees
Refunds aren’t available. As of May 2024, LSAC stopped issuing refunds on CAS fees entirely.3Law School Admission Council. JD Refunds
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U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 2025 Poverty Guidelines
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Law School Admission Council. Apply for an LSAC Fee Waiver
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Law School Admission Council. Requesting Transcripts
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Law School Admission Council. Letters of Recommendation
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Law School Admission Council. Transcript Summarization
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Law School Admission Council. Key to the Online Academic Summary Report
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Law School Admission Council. International Transcripts