Budget 2026: More than $2b to be spent on Corrections by 2028 to keep up with surging prison numbers
New Zealand’s spending on Corrections to keep the country’s growing prison population locked up is increasing under the coalition with the tally expected to reach almost $2.5 billion in the coming years.
The latest Budget allocates an additional $477 million to managing operating cost pressures associated with prisoner volumes. This is on top increases of funding worth $393.4 million in 2025 and $803 million in 2024.
It is rare for three successive Budgets to include massive cost pressure adjustments, yet it has become more common in the past three years for departments to have their funding cut.
Yet with the Corrections vote, the cost pressures posed by increasing prisoner numbers have returned in each of the coalition’s three Budgets. And in each Budget, the Government has found hundreds of millions of more money for Corrections each time.
Today’s figures indicate that the Corrections Budget will be $2.4 billion by 2028, an increase of 26.3%.
The coalition campaigned in the 2023 election on coming down hard on offenders, including bringing back three strikes (which forces judges to give an offender the maximum sentence on their third serious violent, sexual or drug offence), and for introducing harsher sentences.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he made “no apology” for his Government’s hard-line approach to law and order: “We believe the rights of victims come ahead of the rights of offenders each and every day.”
The total prison population, including people on remand, dipped during Covid – a partial impact due to courts focusing on sentencing people who were already on custodial remand amid operating pressures from the pandemic. Since then, prisoner numbers steadily rose, and, in March 2026, there was 11,255 imprisoned, including those on remand, higher than any other time in New Zealand.
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.