California's courts say they need 98 more judges. This year's budget funds 13.

A judgeship is not a budget line.▸ California can raise the judicial branch's operating budget — $5.7 billion in all-fund spending for 2026-27, per the Legislative Analyst's Office — in a single appropriations act. Creating and filling a new judgeship is a separate, slower act of its own: the Legislature has to authorize the position, then a later budget has to fund it, then a county has to build it a courtroom. Each step can stall independently, and the gap between what the courts say they need and what the state has actually funded has been open for years.

Since 2001, the Judicial Council of California has assessed judicial need with a weighted-caseload model: every case type is assigned a "caseweight" — the time a judicial officer typically needs to process it — built from a time study of more than 900 judges across 19 courts.▸ Multiply caseweights by each county's filings and you get an assessed need in judicial-officer full-time-equivalents; subtract the positions a court already has, round down, and you get the number of new judgeships that court needs. The Council is required to update this report to the Governor and Legislature every two years. Its most recent completed report, the 2022 Update of the Judicial Needs Assessment, found that 17 of California's 58 superior courts needed a combined 98 new judgeships. That report is still the operative one: the routine 2024 update was formally deferred in an October 2024 letter to the Governor and Legislature because the underlying time study, due for its five-year refresh in 2023, had slipped to 2025 — and as of Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero's March 2026 State of the Judiciary address, no update had replaced it. The state is currently funding judgeships against a four-year-old count.

Two counties account for more than half the statewide gap.▸ San Bernardino's court is funded for 100 judicial positions against an assessed need of 130.5 — a 30-judgeship shortfall, the largest in the state. Riverside is funded for 89 against a need of 111.7, a gap of 22. Both are in the fastest-growing part of the state; both have carried the state's largest judgeship deficits through multiple assessment cycles.

New judgeships don't arrive in one act.▸ The most recent block the state fully funded — 50 judgeships authorized in 2007 under AB 159 — took fifteen years to pay for in full, arriving in three separate allocations that Chief Justice Guerrero itemized in her 2026 address: two positions in 2018, 25 in 2019, and the last 23 in the 2022 Budget Act.

That block closed out the same year the Council's next assessment found a fresh 98-judgeship gap behind it.▸ Against that backlog, the 2026-27 budget funds 13 new judgeships — phased in over five years, per Chief Justice Guerrero's June 30, 2026 budget statement — with $20.5 million allocated this year just to build the courtrooms for the first three, in Kings, Sutter, and San Joaquin counties. Thirteen new positions against a 98-judgeship gap narrows it by barely more than a tenth, and only once all thirteen are seated.

Understaffed courts don't stop hearing cases; they cover the gap with temporary assigned judges and, eventually, with dismissals.▸ In her 2026 address, Chief Justice Guerrero cited Riverside County — the state's second-largest shortfall — as the clearest example of both costs. Between January 9, 2023 and March 6, 2026, Riverside's superior court dismissed 437 misdemeanor and 57 felony cases under Penal Code section 1050(j), which allows dismissal when a court's own calendar congestion prevents a timely hearing — 494 cases closed not on their merits, but because the court ran out of judges to hear them. Riverside also draws more heavily on the Judicial Council's Temporary Assigned Judges Program than any other county in the state; covering its gap with borrowed judges cost about $3 million in the last fiscal year alone, a recurring expense that a funded judgeship, once seated, replaces outright.

Judgeship-need figures are from the Judicial Council's October 2022 assessment, the most recent completed update as of publication. Dismissal and temporary-judge cost figures for Riverside County are as cited by Chief Justice Guerrero in her March 23, 2026 address and cover the periods she specified, not a full fiscal year in every case.