The new ministry structure will take effect on 1 March 2025. Information on the change can be found here.

Changes like these are of course a big project for archivists, whether they are in the ministries or the National Archives of Iceland. With changes in ministries, a new period of archiving must begin, the old case files and other documents of ministries that are abandoned must be completed, and documents with projects that are transferred to new or older ministries must be transferred. And the mandatory delivery of documents to the National Archives must be considered. In the future, it may be difficult to track down documents from the ministries’ archives because documents concerning the same project can be in the archives of many ministries over several years.

For the most part, the number of ministries and their names were bound by law and therefore they had to be changed if the number of ministries was to be increased or decreased or even their names changed. This was changed and now the number of ministries is published in the presidential decree after the proposal of the Prime Minister who has previously submitted a parliamentary resolution to the Althingi on the matter. The law in 2011 makes it easier than before to change ministries, as can be seen by the number of changes that have been made to the Administrative Council of Iceland in the last 14 years.

The following is a summary of the number of ministries in the Icelandic Government Offices from 1970-2025. It should be noted that these are the ministries as they are in the Act on the Icelandic Government Offices 1970-2011 and in Presidential decrees from 2011. The number of ministries does not give an idea of the number of individuals who served as ministers. It was common in the 20 th century that the same person was minister over more than one ministry and there are also examples of two ministers having served in one ministry, for example, the Minister of Social Affairs and Housing (later Minister of Social Affairs and Equality) and the Minister of Health in the Ministry of Welfare during a period. Furthermore, this summary does not contain information on the transfer of tasks between the ministries, which has been high, especially in recent years.

Here is a summary of the number of council members in the Icelandic Government:

• 1970–1990: 13 ministries

• 1990–2007: 14 ministries

• 2008–2011: 12 ministries

• 2011–2012: 10 ministries

• 2012–2017: 8 ministries

• 2017–2018: 9 ministries

• 2019–2022: 10 ministries

• 2022–2024: 12 ministries

• 2025 – 11 ministries

Here are further explanations of the ministries:

The number of ministries was 13 by the introduction of the Act on the Administrative Council of Iceland from 1969, which took effect on 1 January 1970. These ministries were (and yes, Statistics Iceland was a ministry until 2007):

In 1990 the Ministry of the Environment was added and then the number of ministries was 14, in 2008 the number of ministries was 12, but then the Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture was merged into one ministry and Statistics Iceland was no longer a separate ministry. In 2011 the number of ministries was 10, and two new ministries were created by the merger, namely the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of the Interior. In 2012 the number of ministries was 8:

In 2017, the number of ministries was increased by one when the Ministry of the Interior was divided into the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Transport and Local Government. In 2019, the number of ministries was increased by 10 when the Ministry of Welfare was divided into two ministries, namely the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Health. Between 2022 and 2024, the number of ministries was 12:

In the new government of Kristrún Frostadóttir, the number of ministries will decrease by one, as stated above, and from 1 March their composition will be as follows:

The photo of the Cabinet House is by Vigfús Sigurgeirsson and is from the Post and Telephone Stamp Collection, which is preserved in the National Archives (ÞÍ. Frímerkjasafn Pósts og síma 2002 A24-2-1).