And many more were excused or had their service deferred. Shanti Mathias crunches the numbers to reveal the scale of the problem.
Each year, more than 200,000 New Zealanders receive jury service letters. Their options are laid out before them: you can attend on the date you were summoned, ask to be excused, have your service deferred for up to 12 months, or have the summons cancelled if you’re not eligible for some reason. But there’s another choice, too, one not written on the piece of paper. You could simply not show up.
In 2025, 31.5% of people summoned for jury service didn’t respond to their summons or turn up to court at all. That’s the highest rate in the last five years, according to the Ministry of Justice’s response to The Spinoff’s Official Information Act request, although only just behind is 2023, with 31.3% of people not responding. It’s a massive increase from 2019, before the pandemic, when 13% of people didn’t report for jury duty or otherwise respond to the summons.
Jury summons letters suggest there’s a financial cost to not turning up. “If you don’t show up, or if you refuse or neglect to serve on a jury, you can be fined up to $1,000 under the Juries Act 1981, or you may be arrested and taken to court for jury service,” reads the standard text on letters. In practice, though, this fine is rarely imposed. Information provided to The Spinoff from the Ministry of Justice shows that no money has been received in fines for the last five years. In the five years before that, just two people were fined, both in 2019, according to a Stuff story from 2021.
In New Zealand, anyone accused of a crime carrying a sentence of more than two years in prison can choose trial by jury, instead of by a judge alone. Criminal defence barrister Mark Ryan, from Albert Street Chambers in Auckland, will usually advise clients in this position to choose a jury trial. “It’s a fundamental right for a defendant to have charges determined by members of the community the defence is alleged to occur in, [otherwise] you are going to have a judge who has been a Crown prosecutor prosecuting then determining someone’s fate,” he says.
Attending jury service requires members of the public to give their time, often to listen to difficult and distressing cases. Many are determined to serve. Taylor*, a shift worker in the lower North Island, was called up for jury duty three times before he actually made it to a courtroom. He was first summoned in 2023, he told The Spinoff, but his employer didn’t want him away from work for the period of the trial. He deferred the summons, and, meanwhile, moved to a new job. But when he was called again, he had just been made redundant. Not knowing what the future would look like, he deferred jury service again. A few months later, when the deferment date arrived, his new employer offered to write another deferment letter, but Taylor wanted to serve his community as a juror. He took two weeks of annual leave to attend.
“If I wasn’t in the position to take annual leave, I simply couldn’t afford to be part of the jury process,” Taylor says. Remuneration from the court is not intended to replace wages, and jurors receive $31 per half day, with some expenses for transport costs or childcare covered. Rates haven’t increased since 2004. Taylor received $310 for his time on the trial.
Some companies, and most public sector employers, will continue to pay their employees normally while they do jury service. But this is the exception, not the rule, says Ruth Money, chief victims adviser to the government. “Some employers will help out because they see it as an important social duty, but most don’t – if you normally earn $300 a day and you’re given $60 a day to be on a jury, it’s impractical.” At the same time, she understands why the rate of reimbursement hasn’t increased. “The government has a limited bucket of pūtea – you also have to pay teachers and police and for healthcare.”
In Ryan the barrister’s opinion, the “meagre daily payment” is a major reason for people avoiding jury service, and leads to juries not being representative of the community. Another is that many people simply don’t have time. “Say I’m defending an accountant who has been charged with a serious crime. Routinely all the professionals will ask to be excused from the jury because it will take two weeks.” That is if they’re eligible to serve in the first place: barristers and solicitors, judges, employees of the Ministry of Justice, NZ Police or Corrections, MPs and Parole Board members are some of the roles automatically excused. Excusals may also be granted if, for example, your absence would cause extreme difficulty for your business or employer.
Until recently, people aged 65 or over could be automatically excused from jury service, and that made up the biggest proportion of excusals in the past five years. As of February this year, however, the age threshold for excusal has risen from 65 to 72, after a member’s bill in the name of National MP Carl Bates passed into law. The Ministry of Justice told The Spinoff it was too soon to know if this change has had an effect on the number of excusals being granted.
The ministry doesn’t record the demographics of people who actually end up serving on juries, but people working in the system say that it’s not always representative. For example, having classes or exams is a reason that service can be deferred or excused – so not many university students will make it to court. Similarly, people with major caregiving responsibilities like small children may find that the $80 offered per day for childcare (or $40 if a whānau member is caregiving) is not sufficient, or they can’t find anyone suitable, so there are fewer parents of young children.
Because jury summons are issued through the post based on names of registered voters on the electoral roll who live within 45km of a court, people who haven’t updated their address or aren’t on the roll may not receive their summons, even if they are otherwise eligible and able to participate. “The pool doesn’t look Māori, it doesn’t have people with disabilities, it doesn’t have takatāpui and rainbow people,” Money says.
In 2024, the government consulted over proposed changes to the jury system aimed at improving timeliness. These included increasing the threshold of crimes for which a jury trial can be elected, and changing when during a trial process a defendant can choose to be tried by jury. In a press release announcing the consultation, justice minister Paul Goldsmith said that jury trials increased from 2,000 active cases in 2018 to 3,400 in 2023. Meanwhile, the average duration of a case increased from 349 days to 498 days. “We need to seriously consider these changes as if enacted, all those involved in trials will not have to wait as long for cases to be resolved, allowing them to move on with their lives sooner.”
Money says the duration of trials lengthening is partly due to digital technology increasing the amount and complexity of evidence for juries to consider – more text messages, location information, phone photos, doorbell camera footage and so on. “Enhanced technology and investigative procedures by police mean a lot of material. The disclosures for a serious drug trial, for example, are extremely voluminous, and it does increase the length of trial.”
Any changes to the juror system would require new legislation, and Goldsmith said no decisions had been made following the consultation process. “Our main priority in justice has been reducing the number of victims of crime as we fix the basics in law and order,” he said in a statement provided in response to questions from The Spinoff. “It’s something we’ll certainly be interested in progressing further in the next term of government.”
Remuneration wasn’t among the changes proposed and in November 2025, Goldsmith told The Post that while fees hadn’t increased since 2004, it wasn’t high on the priority list. “We currently have a busy legislative agenda, particularly in the justice space. However, we may consider changes when resourcing allows.”
While there has been no official policy change, people throughout the legal system spoken to for this story agree that it seems to have become harder to be fully excused from jury service. The Ministry of Justice encourages people to defer service instead; many requests for a summons to be dismissed will be met with an offer to defer to a time of their choosing in the next 12 months.
Jury service is a reminder that the rights and responsibilities of being a citizen isn’t just about voting every three years, but participating more broadly. “It is a real insight to what is happening in the world, how terribly victimised people are, understanding some of the reasons people are causing harm,” Money says. “You can’t get that from watching trials on American TV.” She would like to see the Ministry of Justice emphasising how and why jury service is important. “I would love to see it from the perspective of being a social responsibility, not trying to wrangle out of it.”
Most people who are summoned for jury service don’t make it to a courtroom on the date they’ve been called for. But for those who do, regular juror surveys show they get a lot out of it. The most recent survey showed that 87% of people were happy with their experience. In a statement, Jacquelyn Shannon, group manager responsible for courts at the Ministry of Justice, said this feedback is used for making improvements to the system. “While the ministry does not maintain a central register of all suggestions and their implementation status, survey findings are routinely considered as part of ongoing service improvement work.”
Taylor, at least, is happy he used two weeks of annual leave to attend a trial. “I was really grateful I did it, I found it really interesting and engaging. It’s a comfort to me to have been a part of a jury and to know, should I end up in a situation, how that system operates.”
*Last name withheld for privacy reasons.
