Definition
Extra costs are litigation expenses that do not appear on the face of the court record and therefore require independent verification — typically by affidavit — before a taxing officer will allow them in a bill of costs. Examples include witnesses' travel and attendance expenses, counsel fees paid outside formal retainer records, court messenger fees, and similar disbursements that arise in the conduct of litigation but leave no visible trace in the official proceedings.
The term is a term of art from English practice, carried forward into American legal dictionaries primarily as a term of historical record. It operates within the broader framework of taxation of costs — the formal process by which a court officer (historically called the master, in modern practice often the clerk) reviews and approves what a prevailing party may recover from the losing party.
The defining characteristic is not the type of expense but its documentary status: if a cost appears on the face of the proceedings, it is recoverable on the record alone. If it does not, it becomes an "extra" cost requiring separate evidentiary support.
Common Confusion
Extra costs should not be confused with:
— COSTS generally, which refers to the full category of litigation expenses a court may award, including those appearing on the record. Extra costs are a subset.
— SPECIAL COSTS or ADDITIONAL COSTS, terms sometimes used in American practice to describe cost awards beyond ordinary taxation, often as a sanction. These concepts overlap superficially but arise from different procedural contexts.
— DISBURSEMENTS, the broader accounting term for out-of-pocket expenditures. All extra costs are disbursements, but not all disbursements qualify as taxable extra costs.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will encounter this term almost exclusively in two contexts: historical English procedural materials and American legal dictionaries that imported English practice terminology wholesale during the nineteenth century. Very few American jurisdictions formally adopted the term "extra costs" as a term of art, though the underlying concept — that some expenses require affidavit support to be taxed — is alive in modern federal and state practice.
The trap for modern researchers is treating the historical definition as current operational law. When researching what expenses are recoverable as costs today, the governing frameworks are statutory and rule-based: 28 U.S.C. § 1920 in federal court defines taxable costs, and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 54(d) governs the procedure. Neither uses the phrase "extra costs." The affidavit requirement that defined extra costs in English practice now appears in localized forms — some districts require supporting documentation for specific disbursements, others do not.
Corpus researchers working in pre-twentieth-century materials will find the term used with reasonable consistency in its Black's/Rapalje sense. The affidavit requirement before the master is the key operational element to track. When this term appears in older American materials, it typically signals that the drafter is working from English chancery or common law procedural models.
The connection to taxation of costs is the essential thread. Understanding extra costs requires understanding the taxation process itself — who the taxing officer was, what the hearing looked like, and what documentation standards applied. Without that context, the term floats without procedural anchor.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence are in near-identical agreement on this term, which is unusual enough to note. Both define extra costs as charges that do not appear on the face of the proceedings and specify the same affidavit requirement before the master will allow them on taxation. Black's cites Wharton, signaling that the definition descends from English procedural commentary rather than American case development.
Neither source differentiates between types of extra costs or gives guidance on what affidavit content sufficed. Neither addresses how American courts adapted or abandoned the term. This is a case where the historical dictionaries preserve the English import faithfully but offer no navigational help for American practice. Researchers should treat both entries as equivalent snapshots of a received English usage rather than as independent analytical sources.
What the historical dictionaries miss entirely: any discussion of how the distinction between on-the-record and off-the-record costs became less meaningful as American docketing and court record practices evolved. The modern federal cost bill process under Rule 54(d) and § 1920 does not organize itself around this distinction at all.
Jurisdictional Note
The term "extra costs" as a formal category does not appear in current federal practice or in most state procedural codes. The functional concept — that some disbursements require evidentiary support before they will be taxed — survives in various local rules and in the discretion of individual clerks, but without the uniform terminology or the master-based hearing structure that gave the English term its precision.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia, civpro_142: Costs and Taxation of Costs — Rule 54(d) and 28 USC 1920