Wages & real incomes
A pay rise only counts if it beats inflation. This page tracks nominal wages against the Consumer Price Index to show whether New Zealanders are actually getting ahead.
Prices have grown faster than wages since 2020: the average worker's pay buys less than it did.
Cumulative percentage change since the start of 2020. Hover the chart for exact values.
When the wage line sits above the CPI line, pay is growing faster than prices and real incomes are rising. When CPI is on top, workers are losing purchasing power even if their pay packet is still growing in dollar terms.
Since 2020, nominal wages are up +20.1% and consumer prices are up +29.2%. Because prices have risen faster than pay, real wages have fallen by about 9.1 percentage points over that time. The unemployment rate is currently 5.60%, and annual wage inflation is 1.96%.
Wages should rise faster than CPI, consistently, not just in the occasional good year. That's what turns a nominal pay rise into an actual gain in living standards. A wage line that merely tracks CPI is treading water; one that falls behind it means real pay is shrinking even as the number on the payslip grows.
Minimum wage vs the Living Wage, 2015–present
Adult minimum wage, dollars per hour. Steps mark annual April adjustments; the Living Wage is voluntary and updates each September.
Minimum wage moves in flat steps because it's set once a year, each April, by government decision, not continuously by the market like most of the other rates on this site. The Living Wage is different again: it's voluntary (employers choose to pay it), independently calculated by the Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit, and updates each September - it stepped up on a July cycle in its earliest years before settling on September from 2018 onward.
The minimum wage is currently $23.95 an hour, up +35.3% since 2020. The voluntary Living Wage sits well above it, at $29.90 an hour.
The minimum wage should rise at least in line with the cost of living each year, so the lowest-paid workers don't fall behind - but not so far ahead of average wage growth that it costs entry-level jobs. The Living Wage has a simpler answer: it's calculated directly from what a household actually needs to cover food, rent and other basics, so the target is just to reflect that cost accurately, wherever it lands relative to the minimum wage.
What this means
- Nominal wage growth is the pay rise on paper. Real wage growth subtracts inflation: it is what your pay can actually buy.
- Minimum-wage workers saw the biggest nominal increases over this period, but housing and food costs rose faster than the overall CPI for much of it.
- The wage index here is Stats NZ's Labour Cost Index (LCI) - the cost of the same jobs over time, unaffected by people changing roles. That makes it more stable than average earnings, but it doesn't capture bonuses or overtime.
Wage index, wage inflation and the unemployment rate are live from Stats NZ. Minimum wage is live from Employment New Zealand's published rate history. The Living Wage is live too, manually entered from the Living Wage Movement's own published rate history, since no machine-readable historical file is available.