The National Party has abandoned a promise it made during the 2023 election campaign to let people under 30 use their KiwiSaver savings to pay rental bond deposits.

KiwiSaver is a savings scheme where New Zealand workers and their employers contribute money for retirement. A rental bond is the upfront cash — usually four weeks' rent — that landlords require before you move in. Tenants get it back when they leave, provided they haven't damaged the property.

National said during the campaign that letting under-30s withdraw KiwiSaver to cover bond costs would help younger renters who struggle to save enough money upfront. The party won the election in October 2023 and said it would turn this into law. It never did.

The policy would have required changing the KiwiSaver Act 2006. Right now, people can only withdraw KiwiSaver in specific situations: buying a first home, serious financial hardship, serious illness, or leaving the country. Adding rental bonds to that list would have needed a new law. National never introduced one.

When the policy was first announced in 2023, the Green Party pointed out a basic problem with the idea. The Greens said that if tenants could access more money for bonds, landlords would simply ask for larger bonds instead. If suppliers know their customers have more cash available, they typically raise their prices. Economists agreed this was a real risk.

There was another issue too. KiwiSaver is meant to be money for retirement — a long-term goal. A rental bond gets returned to you when your tenancy ends, so withdrawing it doesn't build lasting wealth the way buying a home does. Experts who specialise in retirement savings worried that allowing bond withdrawals would weaken KiwiSaver's original purpose.

The government has a long list of things it wants to do in Parliament, and housing policies that are less central to the coalition agreement — the deal struck between National, ACT, and New Zealand First — have been harder to get through. KiwiSaver rental bonds did not make it into that agreement, so once the government started working on its priorities, the policy simply did not happen.

For young renters, this abandonment doesn't change their immediate situation — the policy never became law, so they were never using it anyway. But the underlying problem remains: rental bonds are expensive and make it harder for people to move into rental housing. No new plan to address that problem has been offered.