Hospital Services: what NZ households spend per week
Stats NZ publishes this category as Hospital services, within Health. It is called Hospital Services here because that is what it is, but every figure on this page is the official category.
What this category covers
Hospital care paid for by the household, which in practice means private hospital admissions, private surgery and associated charges, along with any part of a public admission the household is billed for.
What it does not cover
Out-patient appointments and day visits that do not involve admission are out-patient services. Health insurance premiums are insurance, which is where most private hospital care is actually paid for.
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
Fewer than one household in a hundred records anything here in the survey period, so the sampling error is very wide and the figure is suppressed on this page rather than presented as reliable. The trend is still worth seeing: it has risen across the surveys from nothing measurable, which is consistent with more care being bought privately. Treat the direction as informative and the level as not.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is hospital services in each survey since 2007, for all New Zealand households.
Read the two money columns together. The published column is the money of each survey year itself, so comparing 2007 with 2023 across it compares two different dollars. The adjusted column restates every year in 2026.06 dollars using the Health CPI series, which is the column to use for a real change. That adjustment is our arithmetic, not a Stats NZ statistic.
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 | In 2026.06 dollars | Sampling error | Households reporting | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | $0.00 | $0.00 | — | 0% | — |
| 2010 | $0.00 | $0.00 | — | 0% | — |
| 2013 | $0.40 | $0.55 | ±117% | 0.6% | — |
| 2016 | $0.50 | $0.67 | ±104% | 0.3% | +25% |
| 2019 | $1.00 | $1.27 | ±105% | 0.4% | +100% |
| 2023 | $1.60 | $1.80 | ±90.1% | 0.6% | +60% |
Hospital Services over time
Each bar is one survey, restated in 2026.06 dollars so the six are comparable. In real terms, spending on hospital services has moved by 0 per cent since 2007. In the money of the day it went from $0.00 to $1.60 a week, and most of that difference is prices rather than behaviour, which is exactly why the chart is drawn on the adjusted figures.
$0$3.56
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 household size
Household size explains more of the variation in most categories than anything else on this page.
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 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.
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 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.
The rest of health
These are the other components of the same top-level category. They add up, with this one, to the total on the Health 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.