Federal judges imposed supervised release after 82% of prison sentences in fiscal year 2025, according to the United States Sentencing Commission, a five-percentage-point decline from fiscal 2021.
The commission reported 66,662 federal cases for the year. Of those, 61,557 sentences included imprisonment, and 50,688 of the prison sentences also included a term of supervised release.
Supervised release is a court-ordered period after imprisonment, distinct from probation. The fiscal 2025 figures describe sentences and supervision records, not a measure of future offending or individual risk.
The average supervision term was 46 months after an average prison term of 61 months. Ninety-two percent of imposed terms fell within the range set by the guideline policy statement in section 5D1.2(a).
A statute required supervision in 22% of the cases in which it was imposed. The commission excluded cases with incomplete sentencing information and 23 supervision terms that were not paired with imprisonment from its headline calculation.
District rates varied substantially. Eight districts imposed supervision after every prison sentence in the dataset, while the five lowest rates ranged from 39% in New Mexico to 63% in the Middle District of Louisiana.
Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts data incorporated by the commission counted 119,532 people under federal post-conviction supervision on September 30, 2025. Ninety percent were on supervised release and 9% were on probation.
Among 53,087 supervision cases closed during the year, 66% closed without revocation and 34% closed with revocation. The commission said 23% of all closures followed a technical violation.
The commission also noted that a guideline amendment to its supervised-release policy statement took effect November 1, 2025. The fiscal 2025 statistics mostly describe sentences imposed before that change and should not be read as an evaluation of the amendment.