Household spending › Sales, trade-ins and refunds
Refunds and Insurance Claims: what NZ households spend per week
Stats NZ publishes this category as Sales, trade-ins and refunds of miscellaneous goods, cash receipts from insurance claims, within Sales, trade-ins and refunds. It is called Refunds and Insurance Claims here because that is what it is, but every figure on this page is the official category.
What this category covers
A combined line covering money received from selling miscellaneous goods, refunds received, and cash receipts from insurance claims. The insurance claims part is usually the largest component.
What it does not cover
Premiums paid are insurance under miscellaneous goods and services. Sales of vehicles, household contents, clothing and recreation equipment each have their own category.
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 second largest receipt line and the one that explains why the parent category is negative. Insurance claims are the reason: a household that suffers a loss records the claim payment here while the premium sits in insurance, so the two never appear together. About one household in six records something, and the level should be read as an average over years rather than a regular income.
Every survey year
The Household Economic Survey runs every three years. This is sales, trade-ins and refunds of miscellaneous goods, cash receipts from insurance claims in each survey since 2007, for all New Zealand households. Amounts are money received by the household, which the survey records as negative expenditure.
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 sales, trade-ins and refunds: 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 | $9.50 | ±25% | 56.8% | — |
| 2010 | $10.10 | ±29% | 41.8% | +6% |
| 2013 | $12.20 | ±30% | 25.6% | +21% |
| 2016 | $21.40 | ±61% | 13.7% | +75% |
| 2019 | $21.00 | ±51% | 14.6% | -2% |
| 2023 | $17.30 | ±27.1% | 15.7% | -18% |
Refunds and Insurance Claims 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.
The survey records this category as negative expenditure, because it is money coming into the household rather than going out. Bars show the amount received.
$0$35.83
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.
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 sales, trade-ins and refunds page reports the same breakdowns for the wider category, where the sample is large enough.
The rest of sales, trade-ins and refunds
These are the other components of the same top-level category. They add up, with this one, to the total on the Sales, trade-ins and refunds 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.