Child Poverty Rises with Material Hardship Spike, June 2023

Data collection for the year ended June 2023

Data collection for the latest Household Economic Survey was reduced due to ongoing challenges in the collection environment. The achieved sample size was approximately 14,100 households, whereas the designed target sample size for the survey is 20,000 households.

After thorough data quality analysis, the child poverty statistics for the year ended June 2023 were deemed fit-for-purpose, but users should note that margins of error are higher than designed for. This is especially true for smaller groups such as tamariki Māori, Pacific children, and disabled children. Furthermore, estimates of annual change have larger sample errors than in previous years due to the significantly reduced sample size for the year ended June 2022.

Stats NZ typically publishes child poverty statistics by regional council area. While these are published for the year ended June 2023, data quality issues associated with the previous year mean that annual changes are not available.

Child poverty statistics: Year ended June 2023 - technical appendix provides more information regarding this decision and analysis of data quality.

Impacts of disrupted data collection on 2022 Household Economic Survey statistics details the impact of COVID-19 on data collection and impact on data quality for the year ended June 2022.