What New Zealanders actually earn
Everybody wants to know whether what they earn is normal, and almost nobody can find out. Job ads quote a range that the employer chose, salary surveys cover the roles their sponsors recruit for, and the number your friends will admit to is not a sample. Meanwhile Stats NZ has linked every tax record in the country to every employer record and published the answer, and almost nobody uses it, because it arrives as statistical tables rather than as a reply to the question anybody actually asked.
This is that data, page by page. Median annual earnings for 27 different slices of New Zealand: 16 regions and 11 age bands, each with wages, self-employment, the difference between men and women, and every tax year back to 2000 in both the money of the day and today's dollars.
Read this before you read any number on this site. These figures come from tax records, so they count everyone who had taxable income during the year: the person who worked twelve months, the person who worked three, and the student who worked Saturdays. A median built from that is what people received, not what a job pays. It is the right number for asking whether your income is typical for where you live and how old you are. It is the wrong number for asking what a role should pay, and no amount of care in reading it will make it the right one.
What is in here that is worth knowing. The median for men was $64,010 and for women $50,350, a difference of 21 per cent, and it widens with age from the late twenties onward. Self-employment records a median of $29,890, about 52 per cent of the wage figure. And after inflation, the national median has risen about 47 per cent since 2000, with the lowest paid regions rising fastest and Auckland rising least. Each of those has a section below or a page of its own, with the reasons they are easy to misread set out alongside them.
Your figure stays in this browser. Nothing is sent to us and nothing is stored on our servers. The comparison is against everyone earning in that group, including part-time and part-year workers, so being above the median is a lower bar than it sounds.
Every region
Median annual earnings from wages and salaries, all ages, 2024. Region means regional council rather than city, so Auckland is one area from Wellsford to Pukekohe, and Hamilton sits inside Waikato.
$0$67,818
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
- Northland
- Auckland
- Waikato
- Bay of Plenty
- Gisborne
- Hawke's Bay
- Taranaki
- Manawatu-Wanganui
- Wellington
- Tasman
- Nelson
- Marlborough
- West Coast
- Canterbury
- Otago
- Southland
Not elsewhere included is a residual code in the classification rather than a place, covering earners whose region could not be determined, so it is not charted and has no page.
The regions ranked, and where pay has actually grown
Two orderings of the same sixteen regions. The left column is the level: the median in the 2024 tax year. The right is the movement: how much the median has grown in real terms, after inflation, across the whole series back to 2000. They are different lists, and the difference is the story: the regions that pay the most are not the ones where pay has risen the most.
| Highest median, 2024 | Median | Fastest real growth since 2000 | Real growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wellington | $65,210 | Tasman | +82.7% |
| Auckland | $59,950 | Gisborne | +81.8% |
| Canterbury | $57,780 | Northland | +76.0% |
| Waikato | $56,880 | Hawke's Bay | +69.4% |
| Taranaki | $55,200 | West Coast | +68.4% |
| Manawatu-Wanganui | $55,090 | Southland | +62.2% |
| Southland | $55,050 | Bay of Plenty | +61.4% |
| Otago | $53,660 | Waikato | +60.3% |
| West Coast | $53,520 | Manawatu-Wanganui | +59.0% |
| Nelson | $52,770 | Otago | +58.8% |
| Hawke's Bay | $50,860 | Taranaki | +58.0% |
| Bay of Plenty | $50,730 | Nelson | +54.6% |
| Northland | $50,640 | Canterbury | +49.7% |
| Gisborne | $47,220 | Marlborough | +48.5% |
| Marlborough | $46,320 | Wellington | +39.9% |
| Tasman | $45,900 | Auckland | +32.0% |
Real growth compares the first and last years of the series with both expressed in 2026.06 dollars, so it measures buying power rather than the number on the payslip.
Go deeper
- Am I paid enough? Your pay against the published median for your age band and region.
- The gender pay gap, region by region, over 25 years. Published nowhere else at this grain.
- Wages against self-employment income, and why the self-employed median is half the wage one.
- How to read the average salary for your age, including why these medians sit below advertised salaries.
- What earnings look like across a career, the shape of the whole curve.
Every age band
The same measure by age, nationally. The shape is the story: low in the late teens because most of those earners work part of the year, rising steeply through the twenties as people move into full-year work, a plateau through the forties, and a decline that begins well before 65.
$0$77,501
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
- 15 to 19
- 20 to 24
- 25 to 29
- 30 to 34
- 35 to 39
- 40 to 44
- 45 to 49
- 50 to 54
- 55 to 59
- 60 to 64
- 65 and over
The difference between men and women
In 2024, across New Zealand, the median for men was $64,010 and for women $50,350. The female median is 21 per cent lower.
What that number is. It compares every man who earned against every woman who earned. It is not a comparison of men and women doing the same job, and it is not a measure of whether an employer pays differently for the same work. Two things drive most of it: part-time and part-year work is far more common among women, and the two groups are not spread evenly across industries or seniority. Both of those are real and both are worth knowing about, but they are a different finding from unequal pay for equal work, which this data cannot measure at all.
Why it is here anyway. It is a published official statistic, it is what people come looking for, and the alternative to publishing it with an explanation is leaving it to be quoted without one.
$0$66,570
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
Across the series the difference has narrowed, from 41 per cent in 2000 to 21 per cent in 2024. The same cautions apply to both ends of that comparison.
How the difference changes with age
The same comparison, one age band at a time, as a percentage. It is narrowest in the late twenties and widens from there, which is the pattern worth understanding: the difference is not something that arrives fully formed at the start of a career.
$0$32.24
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
These are percentages rather than dollars. The same cautions apply as above: this compares all men who earned with all women who earned, not people doing the same job.
New Zealand earnings since 2000
Each bar is one tax year, restated in 2026.06 dollars so the series is comparable across time. In real terms, after inflation, the median has moved up 47 per cent since 2000. In the money of the day it went from $21,070 to $57,260.
Some of that is people being paid more for the same work, and some of it is a change in who is working and for how many hours of the year. Tax data cannot separate the two, so treat the direction as solid and any explanation of it as a question rather than an answer.
$0$64,516
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
Wages against self-employment
The survey splits earnings by where they came from. Self-employment records a median of $29,890 against $57,260 for wages and salaries, about 52 per cent of it.
That difference is real and it is not a statement about how hard anyone works. Self-employed income is what is left after business expenses are deducted, it is more likely to be part of a household with another earner, and it includes a large number of people running something small alongside other work or in retirement. A sole trader comparing themselves with the wage figure is comparing profit with gross pay, which are not the same measure.
$0$59,914
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
Every tax year
A tax year is the year ended 31 March, so 2024 means the twelve months to 31 March 2024. The adjusted column restates each year in 2026.06 dollars using the CPI All Groups for New Zealand index at the March quarter, which is when a tax year ends. That adjustment is our arithmetic, not a Stats NZ statistic, and it is the column to use for any comparison across years.
| Tax year | Wages and salaries | In 2026.06 dollars | Self-employment | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | $21,070 | $41,655 | $10,000 | — |
| 2001 | $21,760 | $41,742 | $10,680 | +3.3% |
| 2002 | $22,720 | $42,484 | $12,000 | +4.4% |
| 2003 | $23,530 | $42,916 | $12,350 | +3.6% |
| 2004 | $24,590 | $44,166 | $13,080 | +4.5% |
| 2005 | $25,640 | $44,808 | $13,790 | +4.3% |
| 2006 | $26,790 | $45,315 | $14,080 | +4.5% |
| 2007 | $27,820 | $45,892 | $14,480 | +3.8% |
| 2008 | $29,560 | $47,175 | $15,220 | +6.3% |
| 2009 | $31,290 | $48,496 | $14,920 | +5.9% |
| 2010 | $32,310 | $49,072 | $14,990 | +3.3% |
| 2011 | $32,960 | $47,921 | $16,330 | +2% |
| 2012 | $33,800 | $48,381 | $17,880 | +2.5% |
| 2013 | $35,180 | $49,927 | $18,430 | +4.1% |
| 2014 | $36,000 | $50,321 | $20,090 | +2.3% |
| 2015 | $36,960 | $51,533 | $20,990 | +2.7% |
| 2016 | $38,060 | $52,843 | $21,570 | +3% |
| 2017 | $38,620 | $52,485 | $23,790 | +1.5% |
| 2018 | $40,130 | $53,943 | $25,000 | +3.9% |
| 2019 | $42,100 | $55,766 | $25,450 | +4.9% |
| 2020 | $44,790 | $57,860 | $25,740 | +6.4% |
| 2021 | $47,730 | $60,736 | $25,400 | +6.6% |
| 2022 | $52,130 | $62,035 | $29,290 | +9.2% |
| 2023 | $54,560 | $60,878 | $30,000 | +4.7% |
| 2024 | $57,260 | $61,417 | $29,890 | +4.9% |
Related
- PAYE Calculator, what these figures look like after tax.
- Average salary in New Zealand, the national picture and every region.
- What households actually spend, the other side of the ledger.
- Budget Calculator, set a budget against what you actually earn.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is from Stats NZ, Linked Employer-Employee Data, table LEED_AP1_002, retrieved through the Aotearoa Data Explorer. LEED links tax records to employer records, so it covers everyone with taxable income rather than a survey sample. That is why no figure here carries a margin of error, and why none of them describes a job.
Inflation adjustments use the Stats NZ Consumers Price Index, CPI All Groups for New Zealand, at the March quarter of each tax year, restated to 2026.06. Stats NZ data is used with attribution; the earnings figures are theirs and the adjustments are ours.
OBS_VALUE is a MEDIAN of annual earnings in New Zealand dollars, before tax. Administrative tax data. It counts everyone with taxable income in the category during the tax year, including part-time and part-year earners, so it is not the pay rate for a job.