This report provides information on the material wellbeing of New Zealanders as indicated by their household incomes from all sources over the period 1982 to 2015. It updates the last report published in 2015 which covered 1982 to 2014.

It is one of a suite of three reports that provide information on the material wellbeing of New Zealanders. The suite includes:

• the Household Incomes Report
• the companion report that uses non-income measures (NIMs) to measure and track material wellbeing
• an Overview report which provides a 40-page summary and synthesis of the findings in the two longer reports.

A short Summary document that covers both the Incomes and the NIMs reports is available on MSD’s website, along with another which gives some Guidelines on using and interpreting the findings in the reports.

The income measure used in the Incomes Report is household after-tax cash income for the twelve months prior to interview, adjusted for household size and composition. This is referred to as equivalised disposable household income and is taken as an indicator of a household’s access to economic resources and of its (potential) living standards.

The major focus of the report is on trends in income-based indicators of inequality and hardship.  These trends are set in the context of a description of the changing overall income distribution in the period. Extensive international comparisons are provided.   

The report is about more than just the numbers. It also provides commentary, contextual information and technical notes to assist the reader with a better understanding of the indicators and the trend figures they produce.

All results are estimates, based in the main on data from Statistics New Zealand’s Household Economic Survey (HES) which is a nation-wide survey with an achieved sample in recent years of of around 3000 to 3500 private households. The latest income information is from the 2014-15 HES which had an achieved sample of 5561 private households, some 70-80% larger than usual. The interviews for the survey are conducted face to face and for the 2015 HES were carried out from July 2014 to June 2015. The income questions ask about incomes for the twelve months prior to the interview.

The report is published as part of the Ministry of Social Development’s work on monitoring social and economic wellbeing. It is designed as a consolidated and accessible resource for use by a wide range of individuals and groups (policy advisors, researchers, students, academics, community groups, commentators and citizens more generally), to inform policy development and public debate around poverty alleviation and redistribution policies.

This is the tenth issue in the series of Income Reports which will be updated in similar format as new HES datasets become available. The next update with new findings is expected in mid 2017 based on the data from the 2016 HES.

The scope of the report is relatively narrow. Its focus is on the material wellbeing of New Zealanders as indicated by the equivalised disposable income of their households.  Although it has a short section on the extent of re-distribution of households’ market income through taxation and government spending, it does not seek to give an account of how household income comes together from individual market incomes, social assistance paid to benefit units, and New Zealand Superannuation paid to older New Zealanders.  Nor does the report seek to give a comprehensive explanation of the reported trends by drawing on the usual mix of labour market, demographic and macro-economic and geo-political factors, and on changes in tax and social assistance policy settings.  Some limited context is given to point to macro-level changes that impact on household income, but the report is essentially descriptive.