In 2020, New Zealand workers took home $21 billion in wages and salaries. Then something broke.

By 2021, that number had fallen to $20.6 billion. Not stagnated. Not slowed. Fallen. The country's entire wage bill shrank by $418 million in a single year.

Think about what that means. Across every workplace, every pay packet, every Friday deposit, Kiwis collectively earned less than they had the year before. Not in real terms after inflation. In actual dollars. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources)

It wasn't supposed to work like this. The wage subsidy kept people employed. The economy was meant to be protected. But the data shows something else: 2021 was the year New Zealand's workers went backwards.

The recovery took longer than anyone admits. By 2022, wages had crawled back to $20.9 billion. Still below 2020. It wasn't until 2023, three years after COVID hit, that we finally passed where we'd been. At $21.8 billion, we were making progress again.

Now, in 2024, the wage bill sits at $22.5 billion. Growth is back. But here's what the timeline reveals: we spent two full years just recovering lost ground. Two years of workers showing up, doing the job, taking home less than their 2020 selves had earned.

Zoom out further and the picture gets stranger. Back in 2000, New Zealand's total wages and salaries were around $11 billion. We've doubled that figure, but the path wasn't smooth. The early 2000s saw steady climbs. The late 2000s brought the global financial crisis and its sluggish aftermath. Then came the 2010s: slow, grinding growth that finally started to accelerate in the late decade.

2020 looked like it would be the year that momentum carried through. Instead, it became the year everything paused. And 2021 became the year we slipped backwards.

What happened? The data doesn't explain itself, but the timing tells a story. Wage subsidies kept jobs alive, but they didn't keep wages growing. Hours were cut. Bonuses disappeared. Overtime dried up. The collective pay packet shrank even as employment numbers held.

By the time 2024 arrived, New Zealand had added $1.5 billion to its wage bill since 2020. That sounds like progress until you remember: we lost ground first, then spent years clawing it back.

For individual workers, this shows up as something simpler: the feeling that you're working just as hard but never quite getting ahead. The data proves you're not imagining it. Between 2020 and 2023, you weren't getting ahead. You were just trying to get back.