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 about anybody else's. The Household Economic Survey is the answer to that. Stats NZ asks a large sample of New Zealand households what they actually spent, in detail, and publishes the result by region, by household size, by whether the household owns or rents, and by household income. This section turns that into a comparison you can actually use. Each category page shows the average weekly spend for households like yours, the sampling error that comes with it, and how the figure has moved across six surveys since 2007. Enter what you spend and it will tell you where you sit.

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 whiskers on every chart, 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.

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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 further sub-category is published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so it has no page. The category page lists it.

Clothing and footwear

$42.70
per week, 3% of total spending
sampling error 9.7%
1 further sub-category is published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so it has no page. The category page lists it.

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 further sub-categories are published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so they have no page. The category page lists them.

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 further sub-category is published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so it has no page. The category page lists it.

Other expenditure

$175.70
per week, 11% of total spending
sampling error 5.3%
1 further sub-category is published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so it has no page. The category page lists it.

Sales, trade-ins and refunds

$-38.90
per week, -2% of total spending
sampling error 15.3%
4 further sub-categories are published by Stats NZ with no spending recorded in any survey year, so they have no page. The category page lists them.

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.

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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