Household spending › Miscellaneous goods and services
Legal and Other Services: what NZ households spend per week
Stats NZ publishes this category as Other miscellaneous services, within Miscellaneous goods and services. It is called Legal and Other Services here because that is what it is, but every figure on this page is the official category.
What this category covers
Services that fit nowhere else: legal and conveyancing fees, accountancy and tax services, funeral costs, professional and union subscriptions, licences and permits, and administrative fees paid to public bodies.
What it does not cover
Financial account and credit fees are credit services. Insurance is insurance. Medical and dental services are health categories.
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
A residual category by construction, so it has no single story and a wide sampling error. Funeral and legal costs are infrequent and large, which is what pulls the average above what most households recognise. Treat it as a reminder that a budget needs a line for the unexpected rather than as a figure to plan against.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is other miscellaneous 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 Miscellaneous goods and services 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 | $7.60 | $12.08 | ±16% | 29.3% | — |
| 2013 | $9.80 | $14.19 | ±29% | 29.3% | +29% |
| 2016 | $9.70 | $13.45 | ±27% | 18.7% | -1% |
| 2019 | $6.80 | $8.77 | ±30% | 14.9% | -30% |
| 2023 | $6.60 | $7.39 | ±26.9% | 16.6% | -3% |
Legal and Other Services over time
Each bar is one survey, restated in 2026.06 dollars so the six are comparable. In real terms, spending on other miscellaneous services has moved by 0 per cent since 2007. In the money of the day it went from $0.00 to $6.60 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$19.04
Nothing to chart for 2007, 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.
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, by tenure, by household income. 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 miscellaneous goods and services page reports the same breakdowns for the wider category, where the sample is large enough.
The rest of miscellaneous goods and services
These are the other components of the same top-level category. They add up, with this one, to the total on the Miscellaneous goods and services 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.