What New Zealand households actually spend

Quick answer Adding up every category the Stats NZ Household Economic Survey reports, the average New Zealand household spent about $1,597.50 a week in 2023. The categories below break that down and let you compare your own spending against households of your size, region, tenure and income rather than against the national average.

Everyone knows what they spend. Almost nobody knows whether it is normal, because there is nothing to compare it against: your bank statement tells you your own number and nothing at all about anybody else's. Ask whether $250 a week on groceries is a lot and there is no answer to be had, which is why most budgeting advice falls back on rules of thumb invented somewhere else.

There is a real answer, and this is it. Every three years Stats NZ runs the Household Economic Survey: a large sample of New Zealand households record what they actually spent, item by item, and the results are published by region, by household size, by whether the household owns or rents, and by household income. It is the only measurement of its kind in the country, it is funded by the public, and almost nobody uses it, because it arrives as statistical tables rather than as an answer to a question anybody asked.

What this section is. Every category and sub-category the survey publishes, one page each, 67 pages in all. Each page carries the average weekly spend for households like yours across four breakdowns, the sampling error that comes with each figure, every survey year back to 2007 in both the money of the day and today's money, and a written explanation of what the category actually includes and what it leaves out. That last part matters more than it sounds: the survey counts milk as a grocery rather than a beverage, a cafe coffee as a restaurant meal, nappies as personal care, and mortgage interest as neither rent nor housing. Nearly every wrong conclusion drawn from these figures comes from not knowing where a boundary sits.

Why it is worth your time. A benchmark changes what you do in a way a total never does. Knowing what you spend on food tells you nothing on its own; knowing that a two person household averages $270.20 a week on food tells you whether to look harder at yours or leave it alone and go and look at something else. It also settles arguments: the figures below are the reason we can say a renting household pays about three times the all-household average for rent, and that a mortgaged household records more in interest alone than most households spend on food.

Three things to know before reading the numbers. They are averages, not medians, so they are pulled upward by the highest spenders and the typical household usually spends less. They are survey figures with a margin, shown as a line through every bar, and where that margin is too wide to be useful the figure is withheld rather than shown. And the survey runs every three years, so 2023 is the latest; where a figure is adjusted to today's money using the Consumers Price Index to the 2026.06 quarter, that adjustment is our calculation and is labelled as such rather than presented as a Stats NZ statistic.

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Spending by category

All New Zealand households, average weekly expenditure, 2023.

Food

$299.50
per week, 19% of total spending
sampling error 2.9%

Alcoholic beverages, tobacco and illicit drugs

$31.20
per week, 2% of total spending
sampling error 7.3%
1 more sub-category with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

Clothing and footwear

$42.70
per week, 3% of total spending
sampling error 9.7%
1 more sub-category with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

Housing and household utilities

$398.00
per week, 25% of total spending
sampling error 4.3%

Household contents and services

$57.10
per week, 4% of total spending
sampling error 7.4%

Health

$49.70
per week, 3% of total spending
sampling error 10.4%

Transport

$251.60
per week, 16% of total spending
sampling error 6.4%

Communication

$39.20
per week, 2% of total spending
sampling error 3.5%

Recreation and culture

$133.00
per week, 8% of total spending
sampling error 6%
2 more sub-categories with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

Education

$19.90
per week, 1% of total spending
sampling error 17.7%

Miscellaneous goods and services

$138.80
per week, 9% of total spending
sampling error 4.2%
1 more sub-category with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

Other expenditure

$175.70
per week, 11% of total spending
sampling error 5.3%
1 more sub-category with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

Sales, trade-ins and refunds

$-38.90
per week, -2% of total spending
sampling error 15.3%
4 more sub-categories with no spending in any survey year, listed on the category page.

The total above is the sum of the categories shown, each of which is a separately published survey figure. Because every one carries its own sampling error, the total is less precise than any single category and should be read as an indication of scale rather than an exact amount.

How to use these pages

Pick the category you want to check, enter what you spend on it in a week, and choose your household size, region and tenure. The page shows three separate comparisons, one for each characteristic, rather than one combined figure. That is deliberate: the survey does not publish a figure for, say, two people in Wellington who rent, and multiplying three separate breakdowns together would invent a number nobody measured. Seeing the three separately also tells you which characteristic explains the gap.

If you want the reasoning behind that before you use any of these figures, the guide what NZ households actually spend, and how to read it covers the four ways this data is most often misread: taking an average for a typical household, taking a national figure for your own, acting on a figure whose sampling error is too wide, and assuming a category label means what it sounds like. The rent figure alone moves from $144.80 to $448.80 a week depending on which of those you get right.

Which line does my money go on? That question decides every comparison on these pages, and the answer is rarely the obvious one: fruit juice is not produce, a takeaway coffee is not food at home, and rates are not rent. What counts as what sets out every category with what it includes and what it excludes, in one place.

Where the data comes from

Every spending figure is from the Stats NZ Household Economic Survey, 2023, retrieved through the Aotearoa Data Explorer. Inflation adjustments use the Stats NZ Consumers Price Index to the 2026.06 quarter, matched to each category's own CPI group rather than to the all-groups rate, because food and transport prices have not moved the same way. Stats NZ data is used with attribution.

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