What housing costs, area by area
Everyone knows roughly what their own area costs and almost nobody knows how that compares. Rental listings tell you what is being asked this week for the properties currently vacant, which is a different question from what households in an area actually pay. The Census asks every household, and publishes the answer down to areas of a few thousand people.
What these pages are. One page for every statistical area 2 in the country with enough households to report: median weekly rent, the split between owning and renting, median household income, and the same measures in 2013 and 2018 so you can see which way an area has moved. Alongside each one, the regional earnings figures from the tax data, so a housing cost has something to be held against.
Read this first. A statistical area 2 is not a suburb. It is a Census geography of roughly two to four thousand people, drawn for statistical purposes. Sometimes it matches a suburb you would name, often it splits one in two or bundles several together. The pages use the official name for that reason, and name the district each area sits in. And Census counts are randomly rounded to base three, so components need not sum exactly to their totals and small areas carry more rounding than meaning, which is why areas under 100 households are not published at all.
Both figures are from the 2023 Census. Median rent is what renting households in that area paid; median income is across all households there, including those who own.
Every region
Median weekly rent across the areas published in each region, from the 2023 Census. Auckland has the highest regional median at $550 and West Coast the lowest at $250.
$0$572
These figures are not from a sample, so they carry no sampling error and the bars have no error range drawn on them.
| Region | Areas | Median rent | Cheapest area | Dearest area | Median income |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auckland | 607 | $550 | $148 | $925 | $117,400 |
| Canterbury | 300 | $395 | $145 | $640 | $89,700 |
| Waikato | 244 | $400 | $100 | $690 | $94,100 |
| Wellington | 221 | $510 | $180 | $800 | $115,800 |
| Bay of Plenty | 143 | $450 | $100 | $650 | $90,500 |
| Manawatū-Whanganui | 134 | $350 | $150 | $660 | $80,900 |
| Otago | 127 | $400 | $150 | $710 | $89,000 |
| Northland | 98 | $363 | $160 | $570 | $74,200 |
| Hawke's Bay | 85 | $400 | $150 | $707 | $86,300 |
| Taranaki | 62 | $340 | $174 | $550 | $86,300 |
| Southland | 55 | $300 | $123 | $450 | $80,600 |
| Tasman | 31 | $380 | $240 | $600 | $85,700 |
| West Coast | 29 | $250 | $150 | $360 | $63,100 |
| Gisborne | 27 | $330 | $149 | $515 | $80,200 |
| Marlborough | 24 | $397 | $200 | $500 | $87,900 |
| Nelson | 23 | $445 | $373 | $600 | $83,200 |
What is not here
The Census asks renting households what they pay. It does not ask owning households what their mortgage costs, so there is no median mortgage payment on these pages and there cannot be one: the figure is not collected. For the same reason there is no single housing cost figure covering everybody in an area, only the rent paid by those who rent.
185 areas are not published. Most have fewer than 100 households, and a good number are harbours, inlets and offshore islands with no households at all. Each one is recorded with its reason rather than quietly dropped.
Related
- What people earn, by region and age, from tax records.
- What households actually spend, including housing as a category.
- Commute calculators, for the cost of living further out.
- How to read suburb housing figures, the guide behind these pages.
Where these numbers come from
Stats NZ 2023 Census household tables by statistical area 2, with 2013 and 2018 for comparison, used with attribution. Counts are randomly rounded to base three, and rent and income are measured over different households and must not be divided into each other: how to read this data covers the five rules in full.