New Zealand Coroners Court took 606 days on average to close a case in 2024/25 against 344 in 2018-19, and held 5,151 cases on hand at 30 June 2025 against 4,679 at 30 June 2019, while accepting fewer deaths

What is happening?

New Zealand has a single national Coroners Court that inquires into reported deaths. In the 2024/25 financial year, 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, 4,890 deaths were reported to the National Initial Investigation Office and coroners accepted jurisdiction over 3,441 of them. The court closed 4,157 cases that year. At 30 June 2025 it held 5,151 cases on hand, and the average time to close a case was 606 days, against 612 days the year before. The court notes that these figures were extracted from its case management system on 2025-08-04.

The same court, under the same headings, reported a different picture for 2018-19. That year 3,792 deaths were accepted, 3,221 cases were closed, 4,679 cases were on hand at 30 June 2019, and the average time to close was 344 days, against 342 the year before.

Set side by side, fewer deaths came into the court in 2024/25 than in 2018-19, yet more cases were waiting and each one took far longer to close. The 2024/25 annual report states that, historically, demands on the court have exceeded the available judicial resource, resulting in delay.

The stock has been falling since a peak of 6,544 cases in July 2023. It has not returned to the 2018-19 level, and the capacity that brought it down came largely through relief coroners on fixed-term warrants and a new tier of associate coroners rather than through more permanent coroners.

Whose problem is this?

The people who wait are not the people who decide how many coroners there are. That gap between who carries the delay and who sets the capacity is the reason this problem can persist without a single visible decision causing it.

Where does this problem end?

This document is about capacity and stock, not about the conduct or outcome of any inquiry. Every coronial case it counts is a separate legal process, and none of them is described or judged here.

What is the state now, and what should it be?

Now

Needs a new measurementthe target state: no source opened here sets an official target for how many cases the court should hold or how long a case should take to close. Whether the Coroners Act carries any statutory timeframe for completing an inquiry could not be determined, because the legislation pages refused automated access. This document therefore does not say that no timeframe exists. The only reference point the sources supply is the figures the court itself reported for 2018-19, and that is a baseline rather than a target.

How big is it?

At 30 June 2025 the court held 5,151 cases on hand, each representing a death whose coronial inquiry was not yet complete. The Ministry of Justice reported a lower count of 4,990 active cases a month later, on 2025-07-31, and the two figures come from different points in time.

The flow behind that stock is about 3,400 to 3,800 accepted deaths a year in the years covered here. In 2024/25 the court closed 4,157 cases against 3,441 accepted, a net reduction of 716, which closely matches the fall of 717 in cases on hand from 5,868 to 5,151.

The human size of the problem is not counted anywhere. Each case has family members or other interested parties waiting for a finding, and no opened source estimates how many people that is or how long the longest waits have run. For that reason the affected population is recorded as not derivable.

Under what conditions does it arise?

1. Demand has run ahead of judicial resource. The 2024/25 annual report says so in terms. In October 2023 the court reported that about 1,600 cases could not progress because there was not enough judicial capacity, and it introduced a backlog reduction strategy.

2. The permanent bench is held by a statutory cap. Parliament raised the cap from 20 to 22 full-time equivalents in 2022. At 30 June 2025 there were 21 permanent coroners, just below it. Adding permanent capacity beyond that point requires another amendment.

3. Extra capacity has come in temporary or limited forms. Relief coroners are appointed on fixed-term warrants. Associate coroners, created by the 2023 amendment, hold the powers of a coroner but cannot preside over an inquest, and handle less complex cases and the round-the-clock duty roster. Whether relief and associate coroners count against the cap was not confirmed.

4. Funding for the wider system has been short-term. The 2026 Budget allocated 12.154 million NZD for demand-driven coronial and court costs for 2026/27 only, described as covering the period while a wider justice programme proceeds.

5. Throughput depends on others. Post mortems, expert reports and police enquiries all have to come back before a case can close. The 2024/25 report counts 561 accepted cases still awaiting cause-of-death enquiries, and the sources do not analyse how much of the delay sits outside the court.

What has been tried?

The position of the bodies concerned is on the record. The court attributes historic delay to demand exceeding judicial resource and reports the backlog strategy as the response. The Minister for Courts, in a release of 2025-09-26, reported that active coronial cases fell 15 percent between 2024-07-31 and 2025-07-31 and that the evaluation would finish in 2025/26.

What was found?

Why is it still unsolved?

Supply shortage — the number of judicial officers able to complete inquiries has not kept pace with the work, and the capacity added since 2023 has come in forms that are temporary, limited in scope, or not yet evaluated.

The clearest sign is that the problem is not driven by intake. Fewer deaths were accepted in 2024/25 than in 2018-19, yet the stock of open cases was larger and the average case took far longer to close. A court that receives less work than it did six years earlier and still carries a larger stock is short of capacity rather than flooded with demand.

The permanent bench has a ceiling written into law, and that ceiling has been reached. Each previous response worked around it instead of through it. Relief coroners in 2020, a cap increase of two positions in 2022, and associate coroners from 2023 all added hands, but relief warrants are fixed-term and associate coroners cannot hold inquests, so every inquest still has to be heard by a permanent or relief coroner.

The backlog strategy has reduced the stock from its 2023 peak, which shows that extra capacity does move the numbers. What the record does not show is whether that capacity will stay. The evaluation of the associate and clinical advisor roles was due in 2025/26 and no result has been published, and the latest funding for coronial costs covers a single year. A reduction built on temporary arrangements can reverse as soon as those arrangements lapse, and nothing in the opened sources commits to a level the court is meant to hold.

What observation would mean it is solved?

Candidates — (a) cases on hand fall back to or below the 2018-19 level of about 4,700 and stay there for several years (b) the average time to close a case returns toward the 344 days of 2018-19 (c) the court publishes how long its open cases have been waiting, so that the oldest cases can be tracked rather than averaged away.

(a) alone can mislead. The stock can fall because easier cases are closed quickly by associate coroners while complex inquest cases age untouched underneath. A lower total says nothing about the families waiting longest.

(b) alone can mislead the other way. An average closing time measures cases that have finished. Clearing a block of very old cases raises the average for that year even though the backlog is shrinking, and leaving them open lowers it.

(c) alone measures nothing about speed. Publishing an age profile makes the problem visible but does not shorten any wait. The three have to be read together, and all of them should hold after the temporary funding and fixed-term warrants of the current period have run their course.

What is it connected to?

Fills with researchpathology and post mortem capacity, police investigation timelines, the funding of the wider courts system, and coronial delay in other countries. Relation type and evidence grade were not confirmed in this round.

What these sources do not say

• How long the open cases have been waiting. The 2024/25 annual report gives no age profile of cases on hand, so it cannot be said from these sources how many families have waited more than one, two or five years. A press report on long waits was found but refused automated access and is not used.
• Whether a statutory timeframe exists. The Coroners Act 2006 and the Coroners Amendment Act 2023 could not be opened. This document does not say that the law sets no deadline, only that the sources opened here do not show one.
• Whether relief and associate coroners count against the cap, and the term of an associate appointment. The 2024/25 report says relief coroners hold fixed-term warrants. Nothing opened here states the term of an associate coroner or how either role is counted against the 22 full-time equivalent ceiling.
• Why the stock is higher than in 2018-19 when intake is lower. The sources record the numbers and the shortfall in judicial resource but do not break down how much delay comes from case complexity, inquests, pathology or police enquiries.
• The result of the evaluation. The Ministry of Justice said the assessment of the associate coroner and clinical advisor roles would finish in 2025/26. No published result was found.
• How comparable the two years are. The 2024/25 figures were re-extracted from the case management system on 2025-08-04, and a later report restates the 2018-19 accepted count as 3,800 rather than the 3,792 first reported. Comparisons between years carry differences of that size.
• Any rebuttal or further explanation from the bodies concerned. The court narrative in its annual reports and the release of the Minister for Courts were found and are reflected above. No separate response or explanation beyond these was found.
• How many people are affected. No source counts the family members or interested parties attached to the cases on hand, or estimates what the waiting costs them.

See the evidence

The two annual reports carrying the headline figures were opened directly. The 2024/25 and 2018-19 reports are publications of the court itself and report the same headings for both years, which is why the comparison rests on them. The cap change rests on the government disclosure statement for the amendment bill. The figures for 2019 and 2020 rest on press reports, and the ministry count of active cases rests on a republished copy of the government release. The statute itself could not be opened, so nothing here turns on its wording. This is a Path A output (research-based definition), so observation_refs is empty and provenance_mode: press-derived.

People affected

Estimated range Not derivable

The reason and what is missing are listed under “What is missing” below