As amended in 1986, the law establishes three types of fees that may be charged. The 1986 law makes the process of determining the applicable fees more complicated. However, the 1986 rules reduce or eliminate entirely the cost for small, noncommercial requests. First, fees can be imposed to recover the cost of copying documents.
All agencies have a fixed price for making copies using copying machines.
A requester is usually charged the actual cost of copying computer tapes, photographs, and other nonstandard documents. Second, fees can also be imposed to recover the costs of searching for documents. This includes the time spent looking for material responsive to a request. Under the FOIA, an agency need not create documents that do not exist. Computer records found in a data base rather than a file cabinet may require the application of codes or some form of programming to retrieve the information.