Elective Treatment Within Four Months: 98.0% in 2016/17, 64.9% Now
Source: Health New Zealand, health targets quarter three 2025/26
Health New Zealand published a ten-year table of its own target results alongside the quarterly figures. It shows elective treatment within four months has fallen 33.1 percentage points in nine years.
By Henry Smith · Health system · 2026-06-23
In the quarter ending 31 March 2017, 98.0% of New Zealanders on the elective treatment waiting list had waited less than four months. In the quarter ending 31 March 2026, 64.9% had. That is a fall of 33.1 percentage points, and both figures come from the same Health New Zealand document.
What Health New Zealand published on 23 June 2026
Health New Zealand released its quarter three 2025/26 health target results, covering January to March 2026, on 23 June 2026. Elective treatment within four months came in at 64.9%, against a 70% milestone for 2025/26 and a 95% target for 2030. First specialist assessment came in at 61.2% against a 65% milestone. Shorter stays in emergency departments came in at 74.4% against a 77% milestone. All three missed (Health New Zealand, health targets fact sheet, quarter three 2025/26, published 23 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).
The volumes moved the right way. Health New Zealand delivered 51,089 treatments from the waitlist in the quarter, an increase of 2,500 or 5.5% on the 48,389 delivered in the same quarter a year earlier. The treatment waitlist fell to 77,941 from 82,190. The first specialist assessment waitlist fell to 196,006 from 200,400, with 178,349 assessments delivered against 167,069 a year earlier (fact sheet, pages 7 to 10).
Alongside the fact sheet, Health New Zealand published a second document that has attracted almost no attention: a single page showing the quarter three result for each of the five health targets in every year back to 2016/17 (Health New Zealand, health targets, five and ten years of results, quarter three 2025/26, published 23 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026). We downloaded it and read the values off the chart. They are set out below.
What the decade looks like when you chart it
| Quarter three of | Elective treatment within 4 months | First specialist assessment within 4 months |
|---|---|---|
| 2016/17 | 98.0% | 99.3% |
| 2017/18 | 94.1% | 97.7% |
| 2018/19 | 88.0% | 89.9% |
| 2019/20 | 80.1% | 84.8% |
| 2020/21 | 76.5% | 84.3% |
| 2021/22 | 60.9% | 73.1% |
| 2022/23 | 56.4% | 67.7% |
| 2023/24 | 59.3% | 59.6% |
| 2024/25 | 57.3% | 58.2% |
| 2025/26 | 64.9% | 61.2% |
Read from the ten-year chart in Health New Zealand's five and ten years of results, quarter three 2025/26, published 23 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026. Health New Zealand notes on the same page that historic comparisons reflect the first published result for each quarter.
Every value in that table is Health New Zealand's. The subtraction is ours, and it has not been published anywhere we can find.
What the fall means in people rather than percentages
A percentage hides the size of the queue behind it, so convert both ends.
If 64.9% of the treatment waitlist has waited under four months, 35.1% has waited longer. Applied to the 77,941 people on that list at 31 March 2026, that is roughly 27,357 people past the four-month standard. At the 2016/17 rate of 98.0%, the same list of 77,941 people would have produced roughly 1,559. The difference is about 25,798 people.
Run the same arithmetic on first specialist assessment. At 61.2%, roughly 76,050 of the 196,006 people on that list have waited more than four months. At the 2016/17 rate of 99.3%, the number would be roughly 1,372. The difference is about 74,678.
Put both lists together and the decade has added roughly 100,476 people to the count who are past four months, on waiting lists that are themselves smaller than they were a year ago. That is the number the percentage conceals.
Can the 2030 target be reached from here?
Only by repeating the best year in the decade, four years running.
The 2030 target is 95% on both measures. From the quarter three 2025/26 results, and treating 2029/30 as the target year, elective treatment needs to gain 7.5 percentage points every year for four consecutive years. First specialist assessment needs 8.5.
Now compare that with the record. Across the nine year-on-year steps in Health New Zealand's own table, the largest single-year gain on elective treatment is the 7.6 points just delivered, and the second largest is 2.9. On first specialist assessment the largest single-year gain in the whole decade is the 3.0 points just delivered, and it is the only positive year of the nine.
So the required run rate on elective treatment is roughly equal to the best year ever recorded, sustained for four more years. On first specialist assessment the required run rate is 2.8 times the best year ever recorded.
The same test applied to all five targets separates them cleanly. Faster cancer treatment needs 0.95 points a year to reach its 90% target and has managed 1.6 twice. Childhood immunisation needs 2.9 points a year to reach 95% and has just delivered 4.2. Those two are within their own historic range. Emergency departments need 5.2 points a year against a best year of 4.1. Elective treatment and first specialist assessment are the two furthest outside it.
One more figure is worth stating because it cuts the other way. Of the 45 year-on-year movements in the table, five targets across nine steps, only 13 were improvements. Five of those 13 happened in the most recent year. Quarter three 2025/26 is the only year in the decade in which all five targets improved at once. The direction has changed. The level has not.
What this means if you are weighing up health cover
The case for private health cover in New Zealand rests on the public wait, and this is the clearest evidence for it that exists, because the government published it about itself.
It supports three specific things. The wait is not a recent shock, it is a nine-year trend. The recovery now under way is real but starts from a level roughly a third below where the system was in 2017. And on the published record, the four-month standard is not going to be met for most of the decade ahead on either measure.
It does not support buying cover once you are already in the queue. A condition you have been referred for is a pre-existing condition at every mainstream New Zealand insurer, which we set out insurer by insurer in health insurance with pre-existing conditions. It also says nothing about what going private costs, which we cover in the cost of private surgery in New Zealand, or about the size of the queue itself, which we size in the public surgery waiting list.
The honest limits of this analysis
Five, and they matter.
The decade values are read off a chart, not a data table. Health New Zealand publishes the ten-year series as labelled data points on a Power BI export rather than as a spreadsheet. We extracted the labels and their positions from the PDF and matched each to its axis year. We cross-checked every value for 2021/22 onward against the five-year chart on page one of the same document and against the quarterly fact sheet, and they agree. The five earlier years could not be cross-checked against a second source.
The comparison is not like for like across the whole period. Health New Zealand states on the page that historic comparisons reflect the first published result, and that the data are point-in-time snapshots that may differ from other published statistics because of timing, methodology or data sources. Measurement definitions have also moved: these targets replaced the Elective Services Patient Flow Indicators, which are no longer published.
The people counts are our arithmetic, not official figures. Health New Zealand publishes the percentage and the waitlist size separately and does not publish the product of the two. Nobody has signed off on 27,357 or 76,050.
The run-rate test assumes a straight line to 2029/30. Health New Zealand has not published an annual trajectory for either target, so we assumed equal annual steps and treated 2029/30 as the target year. A back-loaded plan would change the required annual figure without changing the total.
The quarter ending 30 June 2026 had not been published as at 20 August 2026. Quarter three, January to March 2026, remains the most recent published data.
Sources
- Health New Zealand, health targets, five and ten years of results, quarter three 2025/26, the decade series for all five targets, published 23 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026
- Health New Zealand, health targets fact sheet, quarter three 2025/26, national results, milestones, waitlist sizes and treatment volumes, published 23 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026
- Health New Zealand, health targets performance resources 2025/26, the publications page carrying both documents, retrieved 20 August 2026
- Health New Zealand, health targets, the 95% by 2030 targets and the 2025/26 milestones, retrieved 20 August 2026
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