The default behavior is case sensitive, but it can be overridden. encoding/json#Unmarshal Relevant excerpt from the article:

To unmarshal JSON into a struct, Unmarshal matches incoming object keys to the keys used by Marshal (either the struct field name or its tag), preferring an exact match but also accepting a case-insensitive match. By default, object keys which don't have a corresponding struct field are ignored (see Decoder.DisallowUnknownFields for an alternative).