A scrolling audit of who actually owns Aotearoa, built entirely on official numbers from Stats NZ, IRD and the NBR Rich List. No "trust me bro." Just receipts.
Stats NZ measures household net worth every three years. The latest survey (year ended June 2024) is unambiguous: the wealthiest 20% of households hold roughly two-thirds of all household wealth in New Zealand. The bottom 40% hold so little it barely registers on a chart.
Median net worth of this group: $2,400,000. Up 19% in three years.
Every survey since 2015 has shown the poorest half of NZ owning roughly 2% of the wealth. Every. Single. One.
Between 2015 and 2024, a typical household in the poorest fifth went from $8,000 in net worth to $11,000, a gain of three grand. A typical household in the wealthiest fifth went from $1.32m to $2.41m, a gain of over a million. Both groups got "richer." Slightly different scales.
Stats NZ takes every household in the country, sorts them from poorest to richest, then chops the line into five equal groups of about 400,000 households each. Each group is a quintile. Q1 is the poorest fifth. Q5 is the wealthiest fifth.
The middle household in that group. Half above, half below. We use medians because averages get yanked sky-high by billionaires, the national mean is $1.04m, but the median is only $529k. The median is what a typical Kiwi actually has.
The NBR Rich List 2025 profiled 119 individuals and families worth a combined $102.1 billion. That's more than 40% of the entire country's annual GDP, concentrated in fewer than 120 households. Eighteen of them are billionaires. Up from 16 the year before. Cost-of-living crisis. Two recessions in 18 months. Just casually.
That's the entire 2024 budget of Te Whatu Ora's national hospital operating spend (roughly). For two blokes who started a toy company. Good on them. Probably shouldn't be possible in a country of 5.3 million people without something being a bit broken.
That's 17% of every asset every household in NZ owns, sitting in trusts, combined financial and non-financial equity, per Stats NZ.
Only 9% of households actually have one. Funny that.
Trust holders have an average net worth of $2.4 million, roughly five times the national median household ($529,000).
Estimates put the number of trusts in NZ at 300,000 to 500,000. That's the highest rate per capita in the world. We're a nation of five million people running roughly one trust for every twelve of us. Suspicious!
Share of NZ households that have a family trust. They hold 17% of all household wealth.
Total household wealth sitting in family trusts (Stats NZ, 2024).
Share of all trust income in NZ that comes from just 5% of trusts. (IRD, 2021 tax year.)
In 2023, Inland Revenue published its High-Wealth Individuals Research Project. It looked at the actual finances of New Zealand's 311 wealthiest individuals. The result: only 7% of their income came in a form subject to income tax. The other 93% was investment returns and capital gains, taxed lightly or not at all. Effective rate: 8.9%.
Until very recently, NZ & Belgium were the only two OECD countries without a capital gains tax. Belgium at least had other wealth taxes. We had neither. Bold strategy, Cotton.
These are also official Stats NZ numbers. From the same year. The same country.
Children living in material hardship (year ended June 2024). That's 13.4% of all kids in NZ. The government missed its own poverty-reduction targets.
Children in households below 50% of the national median income, after housing costs. 17.7% of all kids.
Share of NZ children living in households where food runs out due to cost (Salvation Army, 2024). NZ exports enough food to feed 40 million people.
Households with negative net worth, they owe more than they own. That's about 5.4% of all households in NZ.
Median net worth of the poorest 20% of NZ households. The richest 20% sit on a median $2.4 million.
Increase in the price of 2L of milk since December 2023. Cheese is up 26%. Butter, 32%. Real "tighten your belt" energy.
Aotearoa is one of the most prosperous nations on the planet by GDP per capita. It's also a place where the median wealth of the poorest fifth of households is less than the cost of a second-hand Toyota, while 119 families pile up $102 billion and 311 of the wealthiest people pay tax at less than half the rate of a checkout worker. Both of these facts come from the government's own ledger.
You can be proud of this country and also expect better from it. Both buttons can be pressed at once.