New Jersey Medical Malpractice Claims Data: The 2025 Numbers

By John Mahoney · October 29, 2026 · About 10 minutes

New Jersey has no patient compensation fund and no annual malpractice claims report from its insurance regulator. What it has instead is a court system that counts every civil case by type, every month, in every county, and publishes the counts. The Judiciary's Civil Statistics report lists medical malpractice filings, resolutions, backlog and pending inventory for the state and for each of the twenty-one counties, and its resolution tables show how the cases ended: jury verdict, summary judgment, settlement or dismissal. This article sets out what the most recent report shows for the court year that ended June 30, 2025, the provisions of the 2004 reform statute that shape those numbers, and what the insurance side does and does not publish. Every figure is from a linked public source; where a figure could not be sourced, it is not here.

Where the numbers come from

• The New Jersey Judiciary's Civil Statistics, June 2025, produced by the Administrative Office of the Courts' Quantitative Research Unit from "a monthly statistical extract of the Automated Case Management System." It reports court-year-to-date figures, July 2024 through June 2025, against the prior court year, with "Medical Malpractice" as its own case type (a Track III case type, so a case is in backlog when it is over 24 months old). Its glossary matters: "Filings include new, reopened, reactivated, and transferred cases," and resolutions "include trials, summary judgments, settlements, default judgments, dismissals, inactivations, transfers, and other summary matters." Filings are therefore somewhat higher than the number of new complaints.
• The New Jersey Medical Care Access and Responsibility and Patients First Act, P.L.2004, c.17, in the official text published by the Legislature, which contains the current wording of the affidavit of merit statute (N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-27), the expert qualification rule (2A:53A-41), and the insurance provisions.
• The federal National Practitioner Data Bank Public Use Data File and Data Analysis Tool.

Court year 2025: 949 filings, 1,129 resolutions

The statewide case-type table lists 949 medical malpractice filings for July 2024 through June 2025, against 952 the prior court year, a change the report rounds to 0 percent. Resolutions rose from 1,091 to 1,129 (3 percent), so the courts closed 180 more malpractice cases than they took in, a clearance rate of 119 percent. The backlog of cases older than 24 months fell from 1,070 to 979 (down 9 percent), which is 42 percent of the active inventory; active pending cases fell from 2,498 to 2,338 (down 6 percent). The report's "backlog per 100 monthly filings" measure for medical malpractice was 1,238, meaning the over-age inventory equals about a year of filings.

For scale, the same report lists 74,122 civil filings statewide across all case types in the court year, so medical malpractice was about 1.3 percent of the Law Division's civil intake, while carrying 979 of the state's 25,104 backlogged civil cases, about 3.9 percent. Malpractice cases are a small share of filings and a larger share of the old ones.

How New Jersey malpractice cases end

The statewide resolution summary for July 2024 through June 2025 breaks the 1,129 medical malpractice resolutions down by type: 54 jury trials and 1 non-jury trial (55 trials, 5 percent); 16 summary judgments (1 percent); 538 settlements (48 percent); 1 default judgment; 451 dismissals (40 percent); and 68 other resolutions (6 percent). Read plainly: about half of the malpractice cases that ended in the court year settled, four in ten were dismissed, and one in twenty was tried to verdict. The report does not say who won the 54 jury trials or what the verdicts were; New Jersey does not publish a verdict table comparable to Pennsylvania's.

The dismissal share deserves a note. In New Jersey a dismissal includes cases dismissed for failure to serve the affidavit of merit, cases dismissed on the affidavit of noninvolvement described below, voluntary dismissals after settlement is reached outside the docket, and dismissals for lack of prosecution. The statistics do not separate them.

The county pattern

The county tables give the same measures for each vicinage. The table below lists the counties with 35 or more medical malpractice filings in court year 2025.

Five counties, Essex, Camden, Bergen, Middlesex and Monmouth, produced 510 of the 949 filings, 54 percent of the state. Essex leads on every measure: the most filings, the most resolutions, the largest backlog (155 cases over two years old, 49 percent of its 317 pending) and the largest inventory. Middlesex has the highest backlog share among the large counties, 130 of 253 pending (51 percent). At the other end, Cape May (4), Salem (4), Warren (12), Hunterdon (5) and Sussex (8) each filed a handful. The per-county resolution tables show the same settlement-and-dismissal pattern as the state: in Essex, for example, 57 settlements and 88 dismissals against 6 jury trials.

The 2004 Act, as the statute states it

The Legislature passed P.L.2004, c.17 as its response to what its findings call "a dramatic escalation in medical malpractice liability insurance premiums." The Act did not cap compensatory damages; the New Jersey state page covers the absence of a cap and the two-year limitation period. What it did do, in the sections that still govern every malpractice case:

• Affidavit of merit, N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-27. The plaintiff "shall, within 60 days following the date of filing of the answer to the complaint by the defendant, provide each defendant with an affidavit of an appropriate licensed person that there exists a reasonable probability that the care, skill or knowledge exercised or exhibited in the treatment, practice or work that is the subject of the complaint, fell outside acceptable professional or occupational standards or treatment practices." The court "may grant no more than one additional period, not to exceed 60 days, to file the affidavit," on a finding of good cause. In a medical malpractice action the affiant must meet the requirements of 2A:53A-41. The affidavit of merit guide covers the timing and the case law around it.
• Same-specialty expert, 2A:53A-41. A person "shall not give expert testimony or execute an affidavit" on the standard of care "unless the person is licensed as a physician or other health care professional in the United States" and, where the defendant is a board-recognized specialist and the care at issue involves that specialty, the expert "shall have specialized at the time of the occurrence that is the basis for the action in the same specialty or subspecialty."
• Affidavit of noninvolvement, 2A:53A-40. A provider "may cause the action against that provider to be dismissed upon the filing of an affidavit of noninvolvement" setting out with particularity that the provider "was misidentified or otherwise not involved" in the patient's care.
• Mandatory referral to dispute resolution, 2A:53A-39. The judge "shall, within 30 days after the discovery end date, determine whether referral to a complementary dispute resolution mechanism may encourage early disposition or settlement," and refer the case under Rule 1:40 if so. The 538 settlements in the statistics above sit against this provision.
• Structured payment of large verdicts. Where a judgment's noneconomic damages exceed $1,000,000, "the court shall enter a judgment ordering that 50% of the noneconomic damages be paid immediately, with the costs and attorney's fees to be paid from that amount," and "the remaining 50% of the judgment shall be paid over 60 months in the form of a structured payment agreement," unless the parties agree otherwise. Judgments with noneconomic damages of $1,000,000 or less are paid immediately.
• Birth-injury limitation period, 2A:14-2. The general two-year period applies, "except that an action by or on behalf of a minor that has accrued for medical malpractice for injuries sustained at birth shall be commenced prior to the minor's 13th birthday."
• Insurance. A physician with responsibility for patient care must carry malpractice coverage "in the sum of $1,000,000 per occurrence and $3,000,000 per policy year," or, if unavailable, a letter of credit of at least $500,000 (45:9-19.17). Insurers must report every "medical malpractice claim settlement, judgment or arbitration award" involving a licensed practitioner to the Medical Practitioner Review Panel (17:30D-17). The Act also created the Medical Malpractice Liability Insurance Premium Assistance Fund, financed in part by an annual $75 charge on every licensed physician, podiatrist, chiropractor, dentist and optometrist and a $75 fee on every person licensed to practice law in the state (17:30D-29).

What the insurance side publishes

The reporting requirement in 17:30D-17 sends settlement and judgment information to the Medical Practitioner Review Panel for licensing purposes, not to a public database. In preparing this article we did not find a New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance publication that counts closed malpractice claims or payments by year in the way Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation or Indiana's Patient's Compensation Fund does. If a reader knows of one, we would like to cite it. Until then, the court statistics are the only official New Jersey series, and they count cases, not dollars.

The federal data: NPDB

The dollars are in the federal data, in part. The National Practitioner Data Bank's Public Use Data File holds de-identified malpractice payment reports made on behalf of individual practitioners, refreshed quarterly, and the Data Analysis Tool filters them by state and profession and exports to CSV. This article does not quote New Jersey totals from the NPDB because they are generated interactively and there is no fixed page to cite; pull them yourself and record the date and settings. A payment by a hospital on its own behalf with no practitioner named is not reported, so institutional payments are undercounted, and NPDB counts will not match the Judiciary's because a payment is reported when it is made, not when a case is filed or resolved. The NPDB reporting guide explains what triggers a report.

How to use the numbers in a case

Aggregate data does not value a case. It describes the system the case moves through, and the New Jersey statistics describe a system with three visible features.

First, the affidavit of merit is the first filter and it runs on a short clock. Sixty days from the answer, one extension of sixty days, an affiant in the same specialty as the defendant: the record review that supports that affidavit has to be done before the complaint is filed, because there is no time to start it afterward. Four in ten resolutions in the court year were dismissals, and some share of those are affidavit failures.

Second, half of the cases that end, settle, and the statute pushes them there. Section 2A:53A-39 requires the judge to consider referral to dispute resolution within thirty days of the discovery end date, which means both sides need a settlement position, with the record behind it, by the time discovery closes. One case in twenty reaches a jury.

Third, the case load is concentrated and slow. Five counties carry more than half the filings, Essex alone has 155 malpractice cases more than two years old, and a backlog equal to about a year of filings statewide means that a case filed today in a large vicinage should be expected to take more than two years to resolve.

All of that starts with the record. The Case Analysis tool reads the medical record and the intake facts, identifies the standard-of-care questions at each decision point with the page cited, and organizes them in the form a same-specialty expert needs to decide whether an affidavit can be signed. It does not predict how a case will resolve; the numbers above are the closest anyone can get to that, and they are averages over a thousand cases that are nothing like yours.

Frequently asked questions

Sources. New Jersey Judiciary, Administrative Office of the Courts, Quantitative Research Unit, Civil Statistics, June 2025 (Introduction and Glossary; Case Type Abbreviations; Civil Caseload Summary by County; Civil Caseload Summary by Casetype and Civil Resolution Summary by Casetype, State and county pages, July 2024 to June 2025). New Jersey Legislature, P.L.2004, c.17, the New Jersey Medical Care Access and Responsibility and Patients First Act (C.2A:53A-38, 2A:53A-39, 2A:53A-40, 2A:53A-41, 2A:53A-27 as amended, N.J.S.2A:14-2 as amended, C.17:30D-17 as amended, C.17:30D-29, C.45:9-19.17 as amended; quoted). National Practitioner Data Bank, Public Use Data File and Data Analysis Tool. Percentages in the text are computed from the report's own counts and are rounded. No NPDB state totals are quoted because they are generated interactively; no figures from law-firm or insurance marketing pages are used.

MedLegal AI is software, not a law firm. This article is general information for attorneys, paralegals, legal nurse consultants and patients; it is not legal or medical advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Verify every statute, rule and figure against the current source before relying on it. Questions: [email protected]