More than 1200 Auckland home support workers are facing the loss of their jobs after Health NZ decided not to award contracts to three non-profit providers, as reported by RNZ. Job losses in the hundreds or thousands make headlines. What almost never makes headlines is the raw count of how many New Zealanders are drawing a wage at all.

So here it is. In 2024, the most recent year available, 2,810,745 people declared wages and salaries as an income source. That is the highest figure in the 24 years Stats NZ has published (Source: Stats NZ, taxable-income-sources). It is up 88,644 on 2023 alone.

Do the arithmetic on that and it means roughly 1,700 extra people started collecting a pay packet every week through the year. Not net new jobs exactly, but net new wage earners: school leavers, returning parents, migrants, people coming off a benefit, people picking up a second income because one wasn't stretching far enough.

The interesting part is what happens when this number goes backwards, because it almost never does.

It has happened twice this century. The global financial crisis was the deeper wound. Wage earners peaked at 2,235,201 in 2009, then fell by 59,730 the following year. That number did not get back above its 2009 level until 2014. Five years. A whole cohort of school leavers spent their early twenties in a labour market that had simply stopped growing.

Covid was sharper but shallower. The count dropped 52,272 between 2020 and 2021, then recovered inside two years, hitting a fresh high of 2,722,101 by 2023. Fewer people knocked out, and back on the payroll far faster. The most likely reading is that the wage subsidy did what it was designed to do: keep people attached to an employer rather than cutting them loose to find their way back later. Whatever you thought of the cost, this is what it bought.

Zoom out and the trajectory is relentless. In 2000, 1,785,855 people earned wages or salaries. By 2024 that was 2,810,745. An extra 1,024,890 New Zealanders in the wage economy in a quarter of a century, growth of about 57 percent. That is not just population growth. It is more women working, later retirement, and an economy that has shifted people out of self-employment and into payroll.

Here is the honest caveat. This is a count of people with any wage or salary income in a tax year, not a count of full-time jobs. Someone who worked three weeks in February and nothing after counts the same as someone who worked all 52. So a rising count can reflect more people doing patchy, insecure work just as easily as it can reflect a booming labour market. It cannot, on its own, tell you which. The data also stops at 2024, so nothing here speaks to what has happened this year.

My view: the recovery times are the real finding. Five years after 2009, two years after 2020. When the next shock lands, that gap is the difference between a bad year and a lost half-decade, and it is largely a matter of what governments choose to do in the first six weeks.