Household spending › Other expenditure
Savings Contributions: what NZ households spend per week
Stats NZ publishes this category as Contributions to savings, within Other expenditure. It is called Savings Contributions here because that is what it is, but every figure on this page is the official category.
What this category covers
Money the household put aside rather than spent: contributions to savings accounts and term deposits, KiwiSaver contributions made directly by the household, investments bought, and superannuation contributions outside the wage deduction.
What it does not cover
Employer KiwiSaver contributions are not household outlays. Money spent on assets such as a car or a house appears in its own category rather than here.
Those boundaries are set by the survey's own classification, not by us. They matter because a figure read against the wrong definition is worse than no figure: it looks precise and it answers a different question. If you are comparing your own spending against this page, check the exclusions above first.
How to read the figure
This category is why the survey's total is not a measure of consumption. Saving is included as an outflow, so a household that saves heavily records high total expenditure without consuming more. Six in ten households record something, and the level rises steeply across the income deciles, which is the clearest illustration on the site of why an all-household average hides the distribution.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is contributions to savings in each survey since 2007, for all New Zealand households.
The figures are in the money of each survey year itself, so comparing 2007 with 2023 compares two different dollars. There is no column restating them in current dollars, because the Consumers Price Index has no series matching other expenditure: the CPI measures the prices of things bought, and this category is not a purchase of goods or services. Part of any rise below is inflation, and nothing here can tell you how much.
The reporting column is the share of surveyed households that recorded any spending in this category at all: the lower it is, the further the average sits from what a household that does spend here actually pays.
| Survey | Published per week | Sampling error | Households reporting | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | $11.10 | ±12% | 18.3% | — |
| 2010 | $15.40 | ±13% | 27.2% | +39% |
| 2013 | $20.80 | ±18% | 33.2% | +35% |
| 2016 | $32.30 | ±14% | 46.2% | +55% |
| 2019 | $36.90 | ±8% | 46.8% | +14% |
| 2023 | $60.40 | ±6.2% | 60.3% | +64% |
Savings Contributions over time
Each bar is one survey, in the money of its own year. There is no CPI series that matches this category for every survey year, so the bars are not restated in today's dollars and part of any rise you see is inflation rather than a change in what households buy.
$0$66.71
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number.
By household size
Household size explains more of the variation in most categories than anything else on this page.
$0$119.72
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number.
By region
The survey groups the country into five broad regions rather than cities, so Auckland is a region and Hamilton is part of the rest of the North Island.
$0$93.13
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number.
By tenure
Whether a household owns or rents correlates with age, income and household composition, so a difference here is not caused by tenure alone.
$0$104.67
Not shown, because the survey sample was too small to report reliably: Renting, no rent, Family trust, Trust, mortgaged, Trust, no mortgage.
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number.
By household income
Deciles split households into ten equal groups from lowest income to highest. A category that barely changes from decile 1 to decile 10 is close to a necessity.
$0$217.91
Not shown, because the survey sample was too small to report reliably: Income group 1, Income group 2.
The dark line with a cap at each end shows the sampling error Stats NZ publishes with that figure: the survey is confident the true value lies within it. A long line means a less certain number.
The rest of other expenditure
These are the other components of the same top-level category. They add up, with this one, to the total on the Other expenditure page.
Related calculators
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page is from the Stats NZ Household Economic Survey, retrieved through the Aotearoa Data Explorer, for survey years 2007 to 2023. Inflation adjustments use the Stats NZ Consumers Price Index to the 2026.06 quarter. Stats NZ data is used with attribution; the survey figures are theirs and the adjustments are ours.
Household Economic Survey figures are averages of weekly household expenditure and carry the sampling errors shown. They are averages rather than medians, so they are pulled upward by the highest spenders. Figures are rounded as published.