Maine's law is the Freedom of Access Act, and the state publishes its own questions and answers on the Act, which describe it as a statute intended to open the government of Maine by guaranteeing access to the public records and public proceedings of state and local bodies. A public record is defined widely as any written, printed or graphic matter, or any mechanical or electronic data compilation from which information can be obtained, that is in the possession or custody of an agency or public official of the State or its political subdivisions and has been received or prepared for use in connection with the transaction of public or governmental business, or contains information relating to it.
Nobody has to be a Maine citizen to ask, since the statute gives the right to a person. There is no required form and no requirement that a request be in writing, although the state notes that most bodies ask for writing so there is a record of when the request arrived and what was sought. Every agency, county, municipality, school administrative unit and other political subdivision must designate an existing employee as its public access officer, the contact point for records requests, responsible for ensuring that requests are acknowledged within five working days and that a good faith estimate of completion is given. For Maine records held locally, see the Maine county pages.
- Five working days to acknowledge: and the same five working days to refuse, or to say that records may be refused once located and reviewed.
- A reasonable period to produce: the records themselves follow within a reasonable time, guided by the agency's good faith, nonbinding estimate.
- Two hours free, then twenty five dollars: staff time for searching, retrieving, compiling or redacting is chargeable only after the first two hours per request.
- Ten cents a page, nothing electronically: copies are capped at ten cents for a standard black and white page, and no per page fee applies to records provided electronically.
Written by SearchSystems.net from Maine's own systems: the state's Freedom of Access Act site, the state's questions and answers on the Act, how to make a request, the Public Access Ombudsman, each read on October 15, 2026 by the SearchSystems editorial team.
The five working days, and what they cover
Two duties fall inside five working days of receipt. The first is acknowledgement: an agency or official must acknowledge receipt of a request within five working days. The second is refusal: under section 408-A(4) an agency has five working days after receipt to deny the request and state the reason, or to state that some or all of the responsive records may be denied once they are located and reviewed. Where neither a written denial nor such a statement arrives in that period, the state treats it as a failure to allow inspection or copying, which is itself subject to appeal.
What does not happen in five working days is production. The records must be made available within a reasonable period of time, informed by a separate duty to give a good faith, nonbinding estimate of how long compliance will take within a reasonable time of receiving the request, with a good faith effort to meet that estimate. The date of receipt is defined too: it is the date a sufficient description of the record reaches the agency or official at the office responsible for maintaining it, and a request for records held by the agency but not by the office that received it must be forwarded internally without willful delay.
The public access officer, and why their absence is no excuse
Maine requires each agency, county, municipality, school administrative unit and other subdivision to designate a public access officer from among its existing employees, who serves as the contact for records requests and is responsible for seeing that they are acknowledged within five working days with a good faith estimate of completion. The statute then removes the obvious workaround. Under section 413(3), an agency that receives a request to inspect or copy must acknowledge and respond regardless of whether the request was directed to the public access officer, and the unavailability of that officer may not be a reason for delay.
Where an agency or official has no regular office hours, the name and telephone number of a contact person authorised to provide access must be posted conspicuously in public and at the office. Officers and certain officials must also complete training on the Act within one hundred and twenty days of taking up their duties, and must make a written or electronic record attesting to completion that is itself available to the public.
What a Maine request costs
There is no fee for making a request, and an agency cannot charge to inspect records unless the record cannot be inspected without being compiled or converted. Copying is capped: no more than ten cents a page for a standard black and white page, with no per page fee at all for records provided electronically. Staff time is chargeable but only beyond a free allowance, at twenty five dollars an hour after the first two hours of staff time per request, covering searching for, retrieving, compiling or redacting confidential information from the records.
Where conversion of a record is necessary, the actual cost of conversion may be added, and actual mailing costs may be charged where copies are posted. Two thresholds govern the paperwork: the agency must prepare an estimate of the time and cost within a reasonable time of receipt, must notify the requester before proceeding if that estimate is greater than fifty dollars, and may require payment in advance where the estimated cost exceeds one hundred dollars or where the requester has previously failed to pay a properly assessed fee.
Waivers are discretionary rather than mandatory: an agency may waive part or all of the fee where the requester is indigent, or where it considers release to be in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of government and is not primarily in the requester's commercial interest.
Writing a request Maine agencies can answer
The state's guidance is unusually practical about scope, with a worked example. A request to the environment department for all records on landfills is very broad, would produce volumes of material and would be expensive, and the agency would probably ask for something more specific. A request for all records identifying landfills within twenty miles of a particular street address is so specific that it may match nothing, because no record is organised that way.
The suggestion is to aim between them, asking for records identifying all active landfills in a named town or county, and to explain what the requester is actually trying to learn, since that lets the agency find the record that answers it. Two limits support the advice: an agency need not prepare reports, summaries or compilations that did not exist on the date of the request, and standing requests are not honoured, so a person wanting the same report each month must ask again each time.
An agency may ask why a record is wanted, but the requester need not say, and the request cannot be refused for the refusal to explain or for the reason given.
When an agency pushes back
Maine gives agencies a formal route for genuinely oppressive requests rather than letting them simply refuse. Under section 408-A(4-A) an agency may seek protection from a request for inspection or copying that is unduly burdensome or oppressive by filing an action in the Superior Court for the county where the request was made, within thirty days of receipt. It must document the terms of the request, the good faith estimate and its efforts to clarify or modify the request, and must give the requester at least ten days notice before filing.
On a showing of good cause the court may establish the terms of production, or limit or deny the request. Mixed records are handled by redaction: where a record contains both public and confidential material, the custodian decides whether the confidential part can be adequately redacted so that access can be given to the rest, or whether access must be refused.
The ombudsman, the courts and the fines
The Legislature created a Public Access Ombudsman, based in the Office of the Attorney General, to review complaints about compliance and attempt to mediate their resolution, to answer questions from the public, the media, agencies and officials, to publish educational material, and to prepare advisory opinions, working alongside the Right to Know Advisory Committee. Formal enforcement is separate: any aggrieved person may appeal to any Superior Court in the state under section 409(1), and the court may order the body, agency or official to comply, including by making records available for inspection or copying.
For wilful violations the Attorney General or a District Attorney may bring an enforcement action under section 410, and the fines escalate with repetition, up to five hundred dollars for a first violation, up to one thousand for a civil violation committed within four years of a previous adjudication against an officer or employee of the same entity, and up to two thousand after two or more such adjudications. There are no criminal penalties for failing to comply with a records request, though it is a Class D crime under section 452 to intentionally remove, alter or destroy documents belonging to a state office.
Questions about public records requests in Maine
Related Maine records
Maine's other public records guides on this site are the Maine background check guide for the State Police criminal history record check, the Maine court records guide for the judicial branch records service, the Maine arrest records guide for what a booking makes public, and the Maine county pages for every county office.