New Zealand has roughly five million people. Last year, the government issued seven million superannuation payments. That's not a typo. That's not fraud. That's how the system counts.

Every fortnight, another payment lands in a retiree's account. By the end of 2024, those fortnightly deposits added up to seven million individual transactions. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources)

The real question isn't about the payments. It's about the people behind them. In 2000, when the dataset begins, the government issued 4.5 million superannuation payments. Twenty-four years later, that figure has grown by 2.5 million. Not because New Zealand added 2.5 million retirees overnight, but because the existing ones keep living longer.

Here's what that growth looks like when you strip away the bureaucratic language: every year since 2020, the government has added roughly 180,000 more superannuation payments to its annual total. That's 7,000 extra payments every fortnight. That's 500 more payments, every single day, than the day before.

Some of that growth is straightforward. The Baby Boomers are aging into eligibility. A 55-year-old in 2000 turned 65 in 2010 and has been collecting for fourteen years. But the acceleration tells a different story. Between 2000 and 2020, superannuation payments grew by 1.7 million. Between 2020 and 2024, they grew by another 740,000. In four years, the system added nearly half of what it had accumulated in the previous two decades.

This isn't just about more retirees. It's about longer retirements. When superannuation was introduced in its modern form in the 1970s, life expectancy for a 65-year-old was another 13 years for men, 16 for women. Today, it's 20 years for men, 22 for women. That's 182 extra fortnightly payments per retiree, on average. Multiply that across hundreds of thousands of people, and you get the curve we're on.

The number that should worry policymakers isn't seven million. It's the gradient. From 2020 to 2024, superannuation payments grew by 12 percent. The working-age population didn't. The tax base that funds those payments is growing slower than the liability it supports.

Every fortnight, 270,000 retirees get a deposit. In four years, that figure will be 300,000. In ten years, it could be 350,000. The math isn't complicated. The politics of fixing it are.