Household spending › Other expenditure
Fines: what NZ households spend per week
What this category covers
Fines and penalties imposed on the household and paid by it. Traffic and parking infringement notices, speed and red light camera fines, court-imposed fines and reparation, public transport fare evasion penalties, and smaller penalties such as overdue library charges. What unites them is that the household paid money and received nothing in return, which is why they sit apart from fees for a service.
What it does not cover
Late payment and dishonour fees charged by a bank or lender are credit services. Road user charges and registration are transport running costs, not penalties.
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
The smallest figure on the site, a matter of cents a week averaged across all households, and suppressed here because the sampling error is very wide. It is worth a page for one reason: the series rose to a peak in the 2013 survey and has fallen since, which is a real change in enforcement or in behaviour rather than in prices.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is fines 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 | $0.00 | — | 0% | — |
| 2010 | $0.00 | — | 0% | — |
| 2013 | $1.00 | ±33% | 3.7% | — |
| 2016 | $0.20 | ±74% | 2.4% | -80% |
| 2019 | $0.10 | ±62% | 1.3% | -50% |
| 2023 | $0.10 | ±55.1% | 1.7% | 0% |
Fines 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$1.38
Nothing to chart for 2007, 2010, because the survey recorded no spending in this category there at all. That is a measured zero rather than a figure withheld for uncertainty.
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. Bars in a pale fill are survey years whose sampling error is above the level at which this site normally withholds a figure. They are drawn here because the direction of a series is worth seeing even where the level is not reliable enough to quote, and the table above gives the error on each one.
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.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
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.
Every figure in this breakdown has a sampling error too large to report reliably, so nothing is shown. That usually means few surveyed households reported spending in this category.
Breakdowns that cannot be reported
Too few surveyed households recorded spending in this category for these breakdowns to be published at a sampling error under 30 per cent: by household size, by region. They are named here rather than left out, because a missing section reads as an oversight and a suppressed one reads as what it is. The other expenditure page reports the same breakdowns for the wider category, where the sample is large enough.
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.