For each set of published written reasons, we measured the number of days between the date the reasons were released and the final relevant date, meaning the latest of all hearing or trial sitting days and all dated written submissions listed in the reasons. Time under reserve begins only when the court has everything before it. Matters decided on written submissions alone are measured from the final submission date.

One limit matters here. The dates in this database come from the published reasons for judgment. The court sometimes pronounces the result first, orally at the hearing or by order, and releases the written reasons later. The published reasons do not reliably record when that happened, so we cannot separate those cases. Where it happened, the wait shown here is the wait for the written reasons, not for the outcome, and the parties learned the result sooner than the number suggests.

Every date in this database was extracted by a rule-based computer script that reads the hearing dates and the release date printed on the face of each set of published written reasons. No generative artificial intelligence was used to extract, verify, or decide anything in this database. Every automated step is a deterministic test that applies a fixed rule, and every judgment call was made by a person.

We verified the data in stages. First, we manually checked every wait longer than one year against the published reasons themselves. Second, we ran every remaining set of written reasons with a wait over 30 days through nine separate automated tests, including whether the recorded hearing date appears in the text of the reasons, whether the date arithmetic is internally consistent, and whether the registry matches the court file number line. Third, every set of reasons flagged by any of those tests was reviewed and resolved by a person.

Throughout this page we cite the median wait rather than the mean; the mean across all written reasons is 56 days, pulled upward by a small number of very long reserves.

The database is built from the court’s published written reasons, accessed through A2AJ (Access to Algorithmic Justice), and covers January 4, 2016 to August 6, 2026. We excluded 240 sets of written reasons, 1.1 percent of the extracted panel, where the wait could not be reliably measured; each exclusion is documented. Rulings that were never published as written reasons do not appear. Matters still under reserve are not yet in the data, so the most recent months will look slightly faster than they will finally prove to be.

Across 20,756 published written reasons from 2016 to 2026, the median wait from the final hearing day to the release of the written reasons is 27 days. More than nine in ten arrive within six months, and 99.4 percent arrive within one year.

The median is the halfway point. Half of all written reasons were released within 27 days, and half took longer. We report the median rather than the average because wait times are lopsided. Most written reasons arrive within a few weeks, but a small number take a year or more, and those long waits pull the average up to 56 days, more than double the median. The average (or “mean”) is distorted by extremes, while the median tells you what typically happens.

A judgment is reserved when the judge does not rule at the end of the hearing and instead takes the case away to consider. For reserved written reasons, the median wait is 38 days, and nine in ten arrive within six months.

Not always. This database measures the release of the court’s written reasons. The court sometimes announces the result at the hearing or by order, with reasons to follow, and the published reasons do not reliably say when that happened. In those cases the parties knew the result well before the reasons were released.

Long waits are the exception. Only 8.2 percent of published written reasons took more than six months, and 133 in ten years took more than one year. Longer hearings and longer written reasons mean longer waits.

The longest waits in the database belong to the largest cases. Written reasons over 10,000 words take a median of 92 days, and the very longest waits involve reasons running to hundreds of thousands of words. Time under reserve generally tracks the size of the reasons the court is writing.

The database is built from the court’s published written reasons, accessed through A2AJ (Access to Algorithmic Justice), and verified against the reasons themselves. Every entry links to the reasons on the court’s own website.

The registry chart shows each registry with at least 100 written reasons in the database, which is enough for a stable median. Fifteen smaller registries are grouped under All Other Registries: Campbell River, Smithers, Williams Lake, Terrace, Rossland, Quesnel, Port Alberni, Prince Rupert, Salmon Arm, Powell River, Dawson Creek, Golden, Fort Nelson, Revelstoke, and Port Coquitlam. Every written reason from these registries is still counted in every other number on this page. A small number of further written reasons are grouped there because the registry line in the published reasons was missing, a file number, or otherwise irregular. You can filter the search table to All Other Registries to see every one of these written reasons individually.

If the written reasons in your case have been published, you can search them by case name or citation in the database on this page. Reasons that have not yet been released do not appear; the estimator above describes typical waits for matters like yours.