The richest and poorest suburbs in New Zealand

There is no polite way to rank your neighbours by income, so we have done it impolitely. Buried in the Census is the figure nobody admits to wanting: what the street over actually pulls in. We took the 2023 numbers and ranked the country from the harbour-view enclaves at the top to the towns getting by on a good deal less, then resisted the urge to editorialise. Mostly. One warning before you scroll: the figures are smaller than you expect, because this is income per adult, not per household. Once you understand that, the whole map makes more sense.

What these numbers actually measure (read this before you gloat)

Here is the catch that trips up every income ranking in the country. The Census reports the median income of individuals aged 15 and over, not households. That bracket includes students on a two-minute-noodle budget, retirees on Super, and the comfortably semi-employed, all of whom pull the figure down. So the richest area in New Zealand shows a median near $58,000, not the six-figure number you might picture, and the national median for people actually in work sits around $41,500. A household with two earners clears far more, which is why the national median household income is just under $100,000, and why the average household's after-tax income had reached about $108,000 by the year to June 2025. Those national averages hide everything interesting, which is the entire reason we go suburb by suburb. If you want to compare your street to the one over the fence, the per-adult figure is the fairest measure, because it counts everyone the same way. It is just not the number that flatters anyone.

Where the money is, and where it grew

At the top, the list holds no surprises, and the suburbs on it would be the first to tell you so. When Stats NZ released the area figures, the Ōrākei local board led the country at a median of $58,000, its income up 21 percent in five years, followed by Wellington City at $55,500 and Queenstown-Lakes at $52,600. At the other end sat Aotea, Great Barrier Island at $28,500, with Buller and Kawerau just above at $28,800 and $29,200. That bottom end says less than people assume: a low median usually means a place with more retirees, more students or more part-time and seasonal work, not a place of hardship.

One thing the headline numbers hide is how narrow the gap looks until you zoom in. Between whole districts, the richest area earns only about twice the poorest. The real spread shows up at street level. In the suburb-by-suburb data, within Hamilton alone the median runs from about $13,000 in one neighbourhood to $57,500 in another, and the lowest figures almost always flag student flats or areas with very few residents rather than genuine poverty. That gap between the city average and the suburb reality is the whole case for ranking suburbs instead of cities, and it is what the table below is built to show.

The pay rise that mostly wasn't

The five-year numbers flatter everyone, so read them with one eyebrow raised. Between the 2018 and 2023 Censuses incomes rose almost everywhere, but prices rose about a fifth over the same stretch, so a good chunk of the gain was inflation wearing a nicer suit. Ōrākei's much-admired 21 percent jump was, in real terms, close to standing still. The places that genuinely got ahead were the ones that outran inflation, and Hastings District led the country with a 42.6 percent rise to $40,500, a real gain even after prices are stripped out. Underneath the area averages, the whole country quietly shuffled up a bracket. The number of people earning between $100,000 and $150,000 grew 73.6 percent in five years, the $70,000 to $100,000 group grew 54.7 percent, and the lowest bands shrank, with the under-$20,000 group dropping by roughly 30 percent. Some of that is real progress and some of it is just inflation nudging everyone into a bigger-looking number. Both things are true at once, which is the most New Zealand outcome imaginable.

National reference points: median income for people in work about $41,500 and median household income just under $100,000 (2023 Census); average household disposable income about $108,000 for the year to June 2025 (Stats NZ).

What a high income doesn't buy

It is worth saying plainly, because every property listing in the country implies otherwise: a fat median does not make a suburb a better place to live. It means the people there earn more, full stop. Plenty of lower-income suburbs beat the wealthy ones on the things that actually fill a weekend, space, weather, a beach you can walk to, neighbours who know your name, a park you can find on a Sunday. The income rarely even keeps up with the postcode. In Ōrākei, the highest-earning area in the country, the typical home sells for around $1.88 million, more than 30 times the median individual income there. A high income and an affordable life are not the same map, which is a fair part of why people keep moving. Income is one column in a much wider table. We rank it because people want to know, not because it settles anything, and certainly not because the number with the most zeroes wins.

Methodology

The figure shown is median income for individuals aged 15 and over, from the 2023 Census, the same measure used for every area so the comparison is fair. These are nominal figures, not adjusted for inflation, so five-year growth should be read against the roughly 20 percent rise in prices over the same period. Stats NZ rounds all Census counts and suppresses figures for very small areas to protect privacy, so a handful of tiny suburbs will show no number. Where a suburb spans more than one statistical area, we combine the parts by population. National context figures come from Stats NZ's later income surveys and are dated on the page.