Court Records in NSW: How to Search, Inspect and Access a Court File

In New South Wales, non-party access to an actual court file runs through the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules, not the state's freedom of information law, and the NSW Online Registry and NSW Caselaw are two separate systems that answer different questions.

New South Wales sits alongside seven other states and territories in our Australia Court Records hub, which covers the pattern shared across every jurisdiction, and the criminal history handoff to Australia Background Checks. This page covers how NSW's own courts, registries and access rules work.

Which Court Holds What

New South Wales runs a three-tier ordinary court structure. The Local Court is the busiest and lowest tier, hearing summary criminal matters, committal proceedings for indictable offences that will be tried elsewhere, and civil claims up to its jurisdictional limit. The District Court sits above it, trying most indictable criminal offences short of the most serious, civil claims above the Local Court's limit, and appeals from the Local Court. The Supreme Court is the apex court, trying the most serious criminal matters such as murder, exercising unlimited civil jurisdiction, and hearing appeals through the Court of Appeal and Court of Criminal Appeal.

The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) sits outside this court hierarchy as a tribunal, but its decisions across housing, consumer, guardianship and other divisions are still published on NSW Caselaw alongside the courts. The Coroners Court, which investigates reportable deaths and fires, and the Children's Court are administered through the Local Court registry structure for day to day purposes, though each keeps its own access rules (see Records Closed by Default below).

There is no single, central NSW file registry. Each court and tribunal holds its own case files, and a request to inspect a specific file goes to the registry of the court that actually heard the matter, not to a centralised state records office.

Searching Online: Two Separate Systems

Two different NSW government services cover most of what a reader searching for a court record online will need, and they do different jobs.

The NSW Online Registry (onlineregistry.lawlink.nsw.gov.au) serves the Supreme, District and Local Courts. Anyone can search the daily court list or a probate notice for free, without creating an account. Filing a form, requesting a transcript, applying for an Online Court preliminary order, managing an NCAT matter or paying a penalty all require registering and, in most cases, paying a fee. The portal is described primarily as a civil-matters service; whether it lets a non-party search the status of a specific criminal case is not clearly documented on the portal's own pages, so treat that as an open question rather than an assumption.

NSW Caselaw (caselaw.nsw.gov.au) is a separate, older service, developed in 1999 and administered by the NSW Department of Communities and Justice, that publishes actual judgments and decisions rather than case-list entries. Its own about page states it currently covers 9 courts, including the Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, District Court and Local Court, with the earliest material dating to the 1980s, and several tribunals, including NCAT and the Dust Diseases Tribunal, generally from the late 1990s onward. It is free, with no subscription, and the Supreme Court's own guidance says most Supreme Court judgments are published soon after they are handed down, though no specific published turnaround time is stated anywhere.

Free national services such as AustLII and JADE also republish NSW judgments once they are handed down, and are useful as free finding aids for a matter that has already concluded, but neither is a court, and neither is a channel for reaching a case still before the court, an unpublished order, or a sealed or restricted file. For that, a reader needs the registry process described next.

Inspecting a Court File

Searching a list or reading a published judgment is different from inspecting the actual file of a specific proceeding, meaning the pleadings, orders, exhibits and other documents a court holds. That right sits in Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 2005 rule 36.12, which multiple independent legal sources, including the Judicial Commission of NSW's own civil bench book, describe as applying across the Supreme Court, District Court and Local Court: on payment of the prescribed fee, the registrar must furnish a copy of a filed document to a party, and may, at the registrar's discretion, furnish a copy to a non-party who appears to have a sufficient interest in the proceedings. A separate and easily confused rule, UCPR 33.13, deals with something different, the production of documents held by the court under subpoena, and should not be treated as the same access right.

For material that needs the court's leave rather than a straightforward fee-based request, such as exhibits, sealed material, material in a criminal matter, or anything subject to a suppression order, the Supreme Court applies Practice Note SC Gen 2, "Access to Court Files." The Supreme Court's own guidance frames this as a balancing exercise between the open justice principle, including journalists' ability to apply for access, and competing interests such as the safety of law enforcement officers, commercial confidentiality, and the privacy and protection of children, victims of crime and other vulnerable people. Applications for media access to a file go in on a specific interactive form available from the Court's own site.

Fees for retrieving and copying a document at the Local Court are $16, plus $9 for each further 10 pages, or part of 10 pages, after the first 20, under the fee schedule effective 1 July 2026. A criminal-procedure document retrieval follows the same $16 plus $9 per 10 page structure. Off-site file retrieval without copies runs $105 as a standard fee, with a higher charge applying to an urgent or after-hours request. The Supreme Court and District Court maintain their own, separate fee schedules; neither was confirmed to charge the Local Court's figures, so a reader needing a Supreme Court or District Court file should check that court's own current schedule rather than assume the Local Court's rate applies.

Judgments and Daily Court Lists

Daily court lists for the Local, District, Supreme and Coroners Courts are published through the Online Registry, updated several times a day and listing cases up to two weeks ahead; individual courts also post their own PDF daily lists, typically updated by 3:30pm. The Children's Court does not publish a daily list at all, consistent with its closed-identity approach to children's matters, described below.

For the judgments themselves, NSW Caselaw is the primary official channel, administered directly by the NSW Department of Communities and Justice, distinct from third-party republishers such as AustLII and JADE. AustLII in particular has been unreliable to reach through automated tools, though it remains a legitimate and widely used free resource for a reader browsing it directly.

Suppression and Non-Publication Orders

The Court Suppression and Non-publication Orders Act 2010 is the general NSW mechanism for restricting publication of, or access to, information connected with a proceeding. Contravening a suppression or non-publication order is an offence under section 16(1) of the Act, and the maximum penalty for an individual is 1,000 penalty units or imprisonment for 12 months, or both. NSW's penalty unit is currently set at $110 under section 17 of the Crimes (Sentencing Procedure) Act 1999 and, unlike some other jurisdictions, is not automatically indexed, so it changes only when Parliament amends the figure directly. At that rate, 1,000 penalty units works out to $110,000 as an illustrative ceiling, on top of or instead of the imprisonment term. A separate, higher maximum of 5,000 penalty units applies to a body corporate under the same section.

Records Closed by Default

Several categories of NSW proceeding are closed to the public, or have identification restricted, as a matter of course rather than by a one-off order.

Children's criminal proceedings are governed by the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act 1987, not the differently named Children's Court Act 1987, which is a narrower administrative statute about the Children's Court's own constitution. Section 10(1) of the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act excludes the general public from criminal proceedings involving a child, subject to specified exceptions, and a related provision restricts publishing or broadcasting material that identifies a child connected with those proceedings, with a specific carve-out allowing publication of the name of someone convicted of a serious children's indictable offence.

Sexual-offence complainants are protected under section 578A of the Crimes Act 1900, which prohibits publishing material identifying the victim of certain sexual offences. This page does not state a specific penalty figure for breaching section 578A, since the exact figure was not confirmed against a primary source; anyone needing that detail should check the Act directly.

Family law matters, including divorce, parenting and property proceedings, are not part of the NSW court system at all. They are heard by the federal Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, and identifying a party or witness in those proceedings without authorisation is a separate federal offence. See Family Court Process in Australia for how that federal process works.

Adoption records carry their own confidentiality rules under NSW adoption legislation; this page does not cover the detail of that separate access process.

Coronial matters are administered through the Local Court registry structure day to day, but the Coroners Court runs its own access pattern for inquest findings, separate from the ordinary civil and criminal file-access process described above.

GIPA and Freedom of Information

The Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (GIPA) does not reach a court acting in its judicial capacity. Schedule 2 of the Act lists "a court, judicial functions" as excluded information of a particular agency, and under Schedule 1 that kind of excluded information is conclusively presumed to carry an overriding public interest against disclosure. Section 43 of the Act goes further and stops an access application from even being made for it. A reader who wants a copy of a court file needs the court's own access process described above, UCPR rule 36.12 and, where leave is required, Practice Note SC Gen 2, not a GIPA application. GIPA can still reach a court registry's purely administrative records, such as its own internal operational paperwork, but that is a narrow category unrelated to case files or judgments.

What a Court Record Is Not

A court file is not the same thing as a criminal history check. A criminal history or police check is a summary of a person's conviction record, held and issued by police, and subject to the Criminal Records Act 1991 (NSW) spent-convictions scheme once a conviction becomes spent. A conviction becoming spent does not remove it from the original court file, a published judgment, or a judgments database that already republished it. For a police check or spent-convictions question, see National Police Checks in Australia, Police Check in NSW and Spent Convictions in NSW rather than this page.

A court record is also not a birth, death or marriage certificate. Those are civil registration documents held by the NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages, covered on Vital Records in Australia, not by any court.