Moving Around New Zealand

Okay, so you're probably pretty keen on moving to New Zealand.
New Zealanders have been moving too though. We discover where New Zealanders prefer living in New Zealand. The results will probably surprise you.

We're Leaving

New Zealanders have been on the move during the last few years. Most of the movement has been focussed on better weather, better prospects or lower house prices.

The three regions people have been keenest to leave are:
  • Auckland, North Island
  • Manawatu-Wanganui, North Island
  • Southland, South Island
Auckland's house prices have risen to extraordinary heights in recent years. Most people benefit financially from leaving Auckland, provided they don't lose too much income. Retired people can often release a large capital sum by leaving Auckland and moving to a cheaper location. Many retirees move to the Waikato, a region to the south of Auckland, or Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty.

Southland is a rural area with no large cities that has suffered from depopulation. Thankfully, owing to a revival in the fortunes of the dairying industry, there is more optimism in New Zealand's rural areas than there was a few years ago. Export prices for dairy products are now substantially higher than during much of the 1990s. As a result of this farm incomes and the value of dairy farms have risen substantially. Prior to the revival, many rural regions had been depressed and their people had been moving elsewhere in New Zealand or to Australia, whose economy has been booming. New Zealanders enjoy automatic residence rights in Australia, so it is an easy move to make.

Would the last person to leave please switch the lights off.

Between 1998 and 2000 more people left New Zealand than arrived. In 2001, around 450,000 New Zealanders were in Australia, and 250,000 of them had been there for more than a year. The flow of departures for Australia had been stemmed because of the improving economic situation in New Zealand, particularly increased job opportunities. The flow seems to be increasing again, however. The average New Zealand working family is around NZ$5,000 p.a. better off living in Australia than New Zealand. For several years, Australia has put the fruits of its economic boom into cutting taxes while New Zealand has been using the proceeds of its own healthy economy to introduce new means-tested benefits.

In the table below, we show the number of people New Zealand has gained or lost through migration in each of the last fifteen years. Even in the years of outward migration, New Zealand's population continued to grow because births exceeded deaths and departures.

Moving To New Zealand (and away)
New Zealand's Population Gains (and Losses) through Migration
To July of the Indicated Year

YearPopulation Gains/Losses
1993+11,000
1994+19,000
1995+25,000
1996+25,000
1997+10,000
1998-7,000
1999-10,000
2000-10,000
2001+5,000
2002+38,000
2003+42,500
2004+20,600
2005+6,900
2006+12,100
2007+9,000


The people of Southland's main city, Invercargill, have been very aware of an exodus. In ten years, the city's population has dropped from over 56 thousand to below 50 thousand. But Invercargill is now fighting back. Its council has launched an innovative drive to attract students to the town by offering them zero-fee education at the Southern Institute of Technology. Economists have advised the council that the predicted 1,000 extra students will bring more money to the local economy than the zero-fee scheme will cost.

The Best Places To Live In New Zealand

The 2006 census figures from StatisticsNZ show there are four regions New Zealanders have been keenest to move to. These are:
  • Canterbury, (Christchurch)
  • Bay of Plenty, (Tauranga)
  • Waikato
  • Otago
Many are surprised that Auckland does not feature as the main destination for relocating New Zealanders. Auckland's population is indeed growing quickly, fuelled by immigration and births, and half of all migrants to New Zealand live in the Auckland area.

But, as we have seen above, more New Zealanders have been moving out of Auckland Region than moving in, particularly people aged 30 years and over. Canterbury, Bay Of Plenty, Waikato and Otago are the regions where New Zealanders prefer to relocate to in New Zealand. Between 2001 and 2006, Canterbury gained more than 8,000 residents from other parts of New Zealand, while Bay of Plenty and Waikato each gained over 5,000 and Otago gained 4,500.

(This continues a trend seen in the previous five-year period when, between 1996 and 2001, Canterbury and Bay of Plenty each gained more than 8,000 people from relocation within New Zealand.) At the same time, Auckland lost about 2,500 people to other New Zealand regions.

The Bay of Plenty, and especially its main town of Tauranga, have become popular retirement areas owing to their warm, sunny climate.

Canterbury is now home to more than half of the South Island's population. Christchurch, the main city, is often said to be the precision engineering and electronics capital of New Zealand.

Waikato has a number of pleasant, small towns close to the city of Hamilton and Otago offers very affordable housing close to or in the university city of Dunedin. Christchurch's principal newspaper, The Press, continues to report high numbers of job vacancies.