Beneficiaries left with $251 a week after housing, MSD report finds
Beneficiaries have $251 a week left on average after paying for housing, according to the Ministry of Social Development's total incomes report RNZ.
The figure is adjusted for price rises and covers the average across all beneficiary households of what is left after rent or mortgage is paid. Think of it as what stays in the wallet once housing is covered. It is down from $262 in 2024 and $263 in 2023, the report says. Before housing costs, average income was $486 a week, down from $492 the year before. Housing took an average of 48 percent of income.
The average covers a wide range. What was left after housing ran from $216 for single people to $824 for bigger families. In today's dollars, the overall figure was higher in 2025 than at the end of 2019 but has been largely flat since 2022. A full-time worker on the minimum wage, paying minimum KiwiSaver, took home $750.96 a week after tax over the same period.
Porirua Whānau Centre budgeting adviser Christine Tawhara said her clients' budgets have no headroom. She said she had "never gone through a beneficiary's budget and found a surplus". Her clients are not getting by, she said, and face real stress and high anxiety. She said every day someone asks for help with a KiwiSaver hardship withdrawal to pay for basics.
Social Development Minister Louise Upston said the Government is focused on growing the economy to lift jobs and incomes. She said paid work is the best path to social and economic well-being.
The report sits beside changes to extra help beyond the main benefit. Under Budget 2026, the maximum rate of Temporary Additional Support falls from 30 percent to 25 percent of main benefit rates. TAS is the last-resort top-up when essential costs are more than the benefit and other help cover. People on New Zealand Superannuation and Veterans Pension are not included MSD. For people with an active emergency housing grant on 1 April 2027, the 25 percent contribution rate will keep applying until the grant ends MSD.
Other detail is published elsewhere. MSD's Regulatory Impact Statement on child support pass-on estimated 41,550 sole parent families would gain an average of $65 a week, with a median gain of $24 a week MSD. MSD also publishes Benefit Fact Sheets on benefit, extra help and hardship trends over the past five years, including a June 2026 edition. Stats NZ's Selected Price Indexes track monthly price moves for food, rents and other household goods and services, which sit behind inflation adjustments.
The broader context here is one officials and ministers will read differently. For MSD analysts, the questions are about spread and detail: which household types drove the fall, how much came from annual benefit adjustments, extra help and part-time earnings, and how housing costs interacted with caps on the Accommodation Supplement and TAS rules.
The political context here is a contest between two ideas, whether the payment is enough and the push for work incentives and fiscal control. The $251 average after housing, next to $750.96 for a full-time minimum-wage worker after tax, leaves a clear gap between benefit and work. It also leaves little room for food, power, transport and debt. That is the point Tawhara is making from casework. Officials will watch TAS take-up, average TAS payments and hardship grants. The Press Gallery will watch how Upston balances restraint in extra help with the Government's jobs argument, and how Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori use the $251 figure on adequacy, housing costs and child poverty.
