A Wellington office worker earning the regional average saw their taxable income rise by just $780 last year. Their power bill probably went up more than that. As RNZ reports, soaring bills are forcing households to cut spending. But here's what the income data shows: Wellington workers aren't getting the pay rises that would let them absorb those costs.

Wellington's total taxable income reached $3.87 billion in 2024, up just 0.02% from the year before. (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources) That's effectively flat. Zero growth. The slowest annual increase in the dataset going back to 2000.

Compare that to the previous three years. Between 2020 and 2023, Wellington's taxable income grew by an average of 2% annually. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, it jumped $84 million. Then, between 2023 and 2024, it added just $900.

Not nine hundred million. Nine hundred dollars. Total. Across the entire region.

This isn't a data error. It's the story of 2024 in one number. Wellington's income growth collapsed at exactly the moment household bills accelerated. Power. Rates. Insurance. Rent. All climbing faster than the paycheques meant to cover them.

Go back further and the trajectory is clear. In 2020, Wellington workers earned $3.69 billion in taxable income. By 2022, that had climbed to $3.78 billion. Growth was steady, predictable, roughly in line with inflation. Then it slowed. 2023 saw a decent bump to $3.87 billion. But 2024? A rounding error.

The wellington high-rise development just approved will eventually add more housing stock. But it won't fix the immediate problem: the people living in the capital right now are earning almost exactly what they earned last year, while every bill they pay has climbed.

This is the squeeze playing out in household budgets across the region. Your power company raised prices. Your landlord raised rent. Your insurer raised premiums. Your pay? Stayed flat.

Over 24 years, Wellington's taxable income grew from $2.3 billion in 2000 to $3.87 billion in 2024. That's growth of 68% over two decades. But nearly all of that growth happened before 2020. The last four years have delivered just $177 million in additional income, split across hundreds of thousands of workers.

When economists talk about a cost-of-living crisis, this is what they mean. Not that prices are high. That incomes stopped growing while prices kept climbing. Wellington workers are earning 2023 wages in a 2025 economy. The gap between those two numbers is what's forcing households to cut spending, raid savings, and make impossible choices about which bill to pay first.