Business advocates are telling the government the electricity system needs a rebuild, and they're not being subtle about it (as reported by RNZ). On the same news list, Chorus posted a bigger profit on rising fibre use and told the market AI will push earnings higher still (RNZ). Power and connectivity: the two bills you cannot opt out of, both in the headlines on the same day.

Now put your pay packet next to them.

Median annual earnings in New Zealand hit $57,610 in 2024 (Source: Stats NZ, median-annual-earnings). In 2019 the figure was $43,190. That's a gain of $14,420 in five years.

Here's the number that should stop you. Between 2000 and 2012, across twelve full years, the median rose from $21,960 to $34,340. A gain of $12,380. So the last five years delivered more dollars into the middle of the income distribution than the first twelve years of this century combined.

Two numbers that shouldn't coexist: a record-smashing pay run, and a country where nobody feels better off.

The explanation isn't complicated. Those 2000s dollars bought things. The 2020s dollars went straight back out the door as power, rent, insurance, rates and groceries. A raise you never see is not a raise, it's a transfer.

Look at the shape of the rises and you can see the cost-of-living years in the data. The single biggest jump in 24 years of records came in 2022, when the median leapt $4,670 in one year, from $48,080 to $52,750. Nearly ten percent. Nobody remembers 2022 as a boom year for household budgets. Because it wasn't. It was the year wages sprinted to keep up with prices and mostly lost.

Compare that with 2010, the post-GFC hangover, when the median crawled up just $620 for the entire year. That's under $12 a week before tax. Two years, twelve years apart, and one delivered seven and a half times the raise of the other. Same country, same jobs, wildly different arithmetic.

The other thing worth noticing: the sprint is slowing. The 2024 rise of $2,390 is the smallest annual increase since 2019. If prices for the unavoidable stuff keep climbing while pay growth cools, the squeeze doesn't ease. It tightens.

Turn the headline figure into a weekly one and it lands harder. A median earner is on about $1,108 a week before tax. In 2019 it was around $831. That extra $277 a week sounds transformative. Ask anyone who's opened a winter power bill or a grocery receipt lately whether it felt transformative.

This is why the electricity debate matters more than it sounds. When wage growth is doing the heavy lifting and still losing ground, the only other lever is the cost side. Fixed monthly bills are where the money actually goes.

A pay rise you hand straight to a lines company isn't a pay rise. It's a pass-through. And for five years, that's mostly what New Zealanders have been getting.