Big Families Are Disappearing: Three-Plus-Kid Households Hit a 28-Year Low
When schools ask parents to keep sick kids home, the households with the most children absorb the most disruption. There are fewer of them than at any point since 1998: 74,900 couples raising three or more dependent children, down from 92,300 in 2019.
Courts Are Sentencing a Quarter as Many Fraudsters as They Did in 1999
Australia's regulator says AI could make home loan fraud easier, and hundreds of millions may already be at risk. Meanwhile, New Zealand's own fraud sentencing numbers have quietly fallen to their lowest level in 27 years of records. Here's what that gap actually tells you.
Six Surveys, Sixteen Years, One Number: 100.0 Every Single Time
Stats NZ's household expenditure series has recorded exactly 100.0 in every survey round since 2007. Here's why a number that never moves is still telling you something important about how we measure the cost of living.
Bay of Plenty Courts Now Convict Half as Many People as 2009
Court reporting fills the news feed, from a fatal strangling sentence to the Gulf Harbour manslaughter case. But in the Bay of Plenty, adult convictions have fallen to 3,282, the lowest in 41 years and down 53% from the 2009 peak.
Fewer Kiwis Get a Student Allowance Now Than at Any Point Since 2000
In 2012, 117,339 people earned income from a student allowance. By 2024 that had fallen to 55,389, the lowest in the 24 years Stats NZ has tracked it. Half the support, in the space of a dozen years.
875,001 People Now Draw a Pension. In 2000 It Was Under Half a Million.
Stats NZ's taxable income data tracks 24 years of New Zealand superannuation recipients. Three quarters of all the growth has happened since 2011, and the year with the single biggest jump was 2020.
Drug Remand Fell 29% in Two Years. Then It Rose 52% in Three.
The crime stories in the headlines this week are violent ones. But the fastest-moving number in the remand data is illicit drugs, now at 1,575 people awaiting trial, a record high in 27 years of figures.
A Thousand More People Now Sit in Jail Awaiting Trial for Burglary
Burglary remand numbers just hit 3,207, the highest in 27 years of records and up more than a thousand in a single year. But before you assume the country is being overrun by break-ins, look at what this number actually measures.
The Work Injury That Tripled Since 2013 While Nobody Was Watching
When a Christchurch business evacuated over an unidentified substance this week, that's the workplace danger we picture. But the fastest-growing injury in the data arrives silently, over months, and claims for it just hit a 15-year high.
New Zealand Just Signed 176,229 New Tenancies. Nobody Stays Put Anymore
Bond lodgements hit their highest level since 2011 last year, jumping nearly 15,000 in twelve months. That's the biggest one-year rise since 1996, and it says something uncomfortable about how fast New Zealand neighbourhoods now turn over.
33,530 Tenders Show What Government Wants to Buy. Never What It Bought.
RNZ says failing new mothers costs New Zealand $2 billion. The government's tender portal lists 33,530 contract notices, filterable every which way. What it can't tell you: what was actually bought, what it cost, or whether it worked.
New Zealand Just Passed 4 Million Taxpayers for the First Time
RNZ has been writing about pensioners' growing tax bill. Behind that story sits a number nobody marked: in 2024 the count of New Zealanders with a taxable income source hit 4,091,334, the biggest single-year jump in 24 years of records.