Here are two numbers from the same Stats NZ table that sit oddly together. The first is 100.0, the percentage of households reporting total expenditure, all income groups, in the most recent survey round. The second is also 100.0. And so is every other value in the series, going back to 2007 (Source: Stats NZ, household-expenditure-by-income).

Six survey rounds. Sixteen years. Zero variation.

That is not a glitch. It is what the field is designed to do. This particular series is a coverage measure, not a spending measure. It confirms that every household in the sample reported something under the total expenditure category, which is what you would expect, because every household spends money on something. A number that sat at 97 or 91 would be the interesting one, because it would mean the survey had holes in it. Sitting at 100.0 six times running means the collection is doing its job.

So the story is not in the value. It is in the timing.

Look at the years the survey ran: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, then 2023. Five gaps, four of them exactly three years apart, and one of them four years long. That single stretched gap, 2019 to 2023, is the only break in the rhythm in the whole sixteen-year run. It also happens to sit directly on top of the most disruptive period for household budgets in a generation.

Think about what a household went through between those two survey nights. A pandemic. Border closures. Mortgage rates that fell to historic lows and then climbed back up. Rents, groceries, insurance, power. All of it happened inside a window where this particular collection took a reading at the start and a reading at the end, and nothing in between.

Here is my opinion, and I will own it as opinion: a three-yearly cadence was a reasonable design choice in a low-inflation decade, and it is a stretch now. When prices move slowly, a snapshot every three years traces the trend fine. When they move fast, you get two dots and a very long line drawn between them, and everyone is left arguing about what the line did in the middle.

The honest counter-reading, and it is a strong one: the Household Economic Survey is expensive and intrusive, it asks families to keep detailed spending diaries, and running it more often would cost real money and real goodwill from participants. New Zealand also has monthly and quarterly price indexes that fill the gap for prices, even if they do not tell you how a specific income group actually reallocated its money. A stable 100.0 is evidence that the survey, when it does run, captures what it intends to. That is worth something.

But if you have been trying to work out how the squeeze landed differently on a Wellington renter versus a mortgage-holder versus a superannuitant, the answer for the 2019 to 2023 period is a single before-and-after comparison. The most likely reading is that the detail of how households adjusted, month by month, is simply not in this dataset. It was never collected.

A number that never changes is easy to scroll past. The dates beside it are the part worth reading.