2025 Sneak Peek: National Accounts Updates Unveiled

2025 preview of national accounts improvements and updates presents the improvements we will make to this year's cycle of New Zealand's annual national accounts. It provides information and analysis to help technical users of national accounts and gross domestic product (GDP) statistics anticipate the impact of updates in the following releases:

• National accounts (industry production and investment): Year ended March 2024 (scheduled for 14 November 2025)
• National accounts (income and expenditure): Year ended March 2025 (scheduled for 14 November 2025)
• Annual balance sheets: 2024 (provisional) (scheduled for 27 November 2025)
• Gross domestic product: September 2025 quarter (scheduled for 18 December 2025)
• National accounts (income, saving, assets, and liabilities): September 2025 quarter - experimental (scheduled for 15 January 2026).

The figures provided in this paper give broad indications of the effect of updates and improvements that can be expected with the releases published from November 2025. The numerical values provided here are indicative and may change in the final publications.

All mentions of specific years in this document refer to the year ended March unless otherwise specified.

Updates expected every year during annual process

Each year, we make updates to the most recent data in the annual national accounts. These updates reflect more accurate data becoming available from the underlying data sources, such as the detailed financial data that becomes available with the Annual Enterprise Survey (AES).

These annual updates are implemented into our quarterly releases every September quarter. Data updates are key to improving the quality of our statistics and are common practice around the world. We follow international best practice in our approach to data updates.

During our annual updates cycle we also take the opportunity to introduce new data sources and methodologies that improve on existing data sources and methodologies. Improvements may result in updates to previously published time series. We try to focus on continuous improvements (implemented annually) rather than infrequent large changes.

We integrate all annual data updates through the supply-use balancing framework, which is a core part of the national accounts compilation process. The balancing process reconciles transactions across the economy in current prices from a wide range of data sources. It involves an extensive confrontation process to reconcile the flow of goods and services and produce consistent views of GDP between production, income, and expenditure measures. We undertake this balancing process for the latest annual period, and we also rebalance the prior year.

The annual updates from balancing affect nearly all statistics published in the national accounts releases. The annual reconciled data is incorporated into our higher-frequency measures (such as our quarterly gross domestic product and national accounts: income, saving, assets, and liabilities series), which results in updates to previously published numbers. This is known as benchmarking. The quarterly data is revised to match the new annual numbers.

On this page

Main improvements to national accounts statistics are the result of new and updated data and information having become available since last year's annual release in November 2024.

The most notable changes to the national accounts and nominal GDP statistics this year are:

• the update of industry output and expenditure item benchmarks to 2024, reflecting the annual reconciliation of goods and services flows
• the incorporation of 2023 Census and Household Economic Survey (HES) 2023 into various national accounts series
• the inclusion of reporting change in insurance industries under IFRS17 for the 2024 year
• the incorporation of balance of payments and trade data updates, including methodology changes for low-value goods imports.

Main updates to quarterly gross domestic product outlines improvements to measures of quarterly economic growth in real terms (which exclude price changes), flowing from the annual updates and methodology improvements.

Main improvements to national accounts statistics

This section provides a detailed analysis of the main improvements to the national accounts and nominal gross domestic product (GDP) statistics and how these improvements will be reflected in this year's statistics.

Overview of the annual national accounts publications

National accounts (industry production and investment) provides comprehensive industry data on production, investment, and capital stocks. It focuses on industry data and the benchmarks for the current price level of activity, which update and maintain the quality of the quarterly production measure of GDP (GDP-P).

National accounts (income and expenditure) provides information on the national income available for spending and saving, in current prices. The release gives an insight into how income is used and invested between different sectors of the economy. Income and expenditure items provide the basis of updated benchmarks for measuring the quarterly expenditure measure of GDP (GDP-E).

Both these publications provide information on the income measure of GDP (GDP-I) and its components and provide updated benchmarks for measuring the quarterly GDP (I).

Annual balance sheets (provisional) provides estimates of assets, liabilities, and net worth held by New Zealand institutional sectors at a point in time. This includes accumulation accounts, which explain the movements from one balance sheet to the next in terms of transactions, price changes, catastrophic losses, and other volume changes.

Effect of updates on nominal GDP

Tables 1 and 2 show each measure of GDP and selected components expressed as annual percentage changes after including the updates discussed in this paper. The annual percentage changes from last year's annual publications and the most recent quarterly publications are provided alongside for contrast.

The annual production and income measures of GDP are derived using the same inputs and are always, by definition, the same in annual current prices.

Table 1, Production and income GDP in current prices (percentage change in contrast with previously published figures):

Table 2, Expenditure on GDP in current prices (percentage change in contrast with previously published figures):

Updates and improvements to production and income GDP

After incorporating all updates and improvements, nominal GDP-P/GDP-I for the year ended March 2024 increased by 6.0 percent from March 2023, which is compared with last year's provisional increase of 5.6 percent. The updated 2024 figure is about $1.9 billion higher than the 2024 level published in January 2025 ($416 billion). The percentage movement in GDP-P/GDP-I for the year ended March 2023 increased from 9.6 to 9.8 percent.

The updated figures include:

• enhancements resulting from the supply-use commodity balancing process applied to 2023 and 2024
• the incorporation of 2023 Census and Household Economic Survey (HES) 2023 into national accounts housing series
• the inclusion of reporting change in insurance industries under IFRS17
• additional improvements to the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) taxes methodology that was implemented last year, resulting in a slightly higher 2023 value ($12 million) than was published last year
• improvements to goods and services tax (GST) on production methodology
• import duty revisions and excise tax refund changes relating to ceasing oil refining in New Zealand .

Incorporation of 2023 Census and HES 2023

Property operating industries were impacted by the incorporation of:

• the 2023 Census for the value of rental services, back to 2019
• the Household Economic Survey (HES) 2023 for maintenance costs per dwelling. The updates from the HES incorporation go back to 2022. Normally we would revise back to the previous HES, but due to COVID-19 there was no HES in 2021, and under the circumstances we would not assume a smooth change in spending between HES 2019 and HES 2023.

Inclusion of reporting change in insurance industries under IFRS17

Insurance companies are now reporting on a new International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS), known as IFRS17, which has been incorporated into the Annual Enterprise Survey (AES) 2024 release. In measuring insurance flows in national accounts, for the 2024 year we have aimed to 'look through' the change in accounting standards and reflect real-world changes in insurance premiums and claims between 2023 and 2024. This is consistent with the approach of other national statistics offices, in response to IFRS17. The resulting numbers have been reviewed against other data we have available on insurance, such as producers price index data and Insurance Council NZ information. We will review the 2024 numbers again next year, in the context of two years of AES data under IFRS17 and may make further changes.

Improvements to GST on production methodology

We have made further revisions to GST on production, as well as backwards revisions to fix the GST rates 'drift' issue, as discussed in 2024 preview of national accounts improvements.

The fixes were:

• increasing the GST on residential building to account for the decline in the share of building done by owner-occupiers (owner-occupier builders do not pay GST on their labour)
• incorporating GST on low-value goods imports, back to 2020, reflecting the law change that came in on October 2019 applying GST on such imports
• updating the treatment of GST on household consumption expenditure (HCE) on nearly all commodities to fix the GST rates 'drift' issue (a problem caused by an interaction in our production system in the mathematical optimisation stage that caused GST rates to 'drift' slightly over time, starting from 2017) and reflect the increase in NZ households spending abroad (which is free from GST) in the 2023 and 2024 years after borders re-opened.

No further improvements are planned for GST on production.

Import duty revisions and excise tax refunds

From 2023, fuel excise tax refunds are deducted from fuel import duties rather than from the domestic fuel excise taxes. These taxes and refunds were previously allocated to the same industry as oil companies and oil refinery. With the closure of the Marsden Point refinery, imports account for almost all dutiable fuel supplied. The change in presentation will result in a downward adjustment to 2023 fuel import duties of $65 million, compared with the figure we published last year and a corresponding upward adjustment to indirect taxes allocated to industry. Import duties are unallocated.

Updates and improvements to expenditure GDP

After incorporating all updates and improvements, nominal GDP-E in table 2 for the year ended March 2024 increased by 6.0 percent from March 2023, which compares with last year's provisional increase of 6.1 percent. The updated 2024 figure adds about $106 million to the 2024 level published in January 2025 ($417 billion). GDP-E for the year ended March 2023 increased to 9.8 percent, compared with last year's figure of 9.6 percent.

Household consumption expenditure (HCE)

Revisions to HCE have been incorporated into this year's annual release. For the year ended March 2024, updates and improvements increased $140 million from the most recently published figure (with June quarter GDP published in September 2025), giving an updated annual percentage increase of 5.8 percent. The 2023 HCE figure was revised down by $735 million.

This year the main updates to 2024 HCE, by expenditure type, are as follows:

• For housing and household utilities, actual rents and imputed rents for owner-occupied dwellings were revised back to 2019 (mainly from the incorporation of the Census 2023 benchmarks). The revisions for this expenditure type were downwards for 2019 to 2024.
• Food and non-alcoholic beverages was revised upwards following confrontation with industry supply and use data.
• Education was revised upwards following confrontation with industry supply and use data.
• Transport was revised downwards following confrontation with industry supply and use data. The movement was also influenced by travel credits.
• Restaurants and hotels was revised upwards following confrontation with industry supply and use data.
• Low value imports was revised upwards with the inclusion of GST from 2019 onwards.
• Miscellaneous goods and services was revised upwards, mainly due to the following drivers:
  • upwards revisions to insurance, resulting from the increase in premiums over 2024 in response to the Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods in the March 2023 quarter
  • revisions to social protection (such as rest homes and childcare services) based on industry supply data and to some miscellaneous goods based on imports data.

HCE represents spending on goods and services by New Zealand residents and contributes approximately 56 percent to the expenditure measure of GDP.

Investment

Updates to gross fixed capital formation (GFKF) reflect new data and other improvements, including those arising from the commodity-balancing process. The following list provides the main updates, by asset type:

• Other construction - we have updated our treatment of the City Rail Link infrastructure project, leading to downwards revisions in other construction from 2019 onwards and a small upwards revision in 2018. Part of this updated treatment reflects that some of the investment on this infrastructure is captured under non-residential buildings. The sector classification of the infrastructural investment has also been updated.
• Residential buildings - the method for calculating GST on residential buildings has been updated, leading to upwards revisions in residential buildings from 2012 onwards. Updated quarterly Building Activity Survey data has been incorporated, leading to upwards revisions in residential buildings for 2023 and 2024. We have corrected our sector classification of Housing New Zealand | Kāinga Ora residential building investment data from 2018 onwards. This update has shifted some residential building GFKF from the private sector to the central government sector.
• Non-residential buildings - updated quarterly Building Activity Survey data has been included, leading to small revisions in 2023 and 2024. The sector classification of non-residential building investment from the City Rail Link infrastructure project has also been updated from 2019 onwards, resulting in a shift from private sector into local government sector.
• Software - 2023 Census data has been incorporated into estimates of investment in own-account software development, leading to an upwards revision of 2023 software GFKF. Our process to incorporate census data in software includes updating our model for between-census years. We have taken the opportunity to update how 2018 Census data was incorporated at the time. The result is upwards revisions to software GFKF from 2014 onwards and includes updates to the allocation between sectors.
• Plant, machinery, and equipment - updated input data has led to downwards revisions in plant, machinery, and equipment for 2023 and 2024.
• Transport equipment - ship imports and exports have been updated to reflect coverage of New Zealand shipping investments, leading to a downwards revision of transport equipment GFKF in 2023. Air-transport equipment has also contributed to downwards revisions to transport equipment GFKF in 2023 and 2024, due to input data updates and a review of the imports categories included in the supply-use balancing framework for this asset.
• Research and development - Research and Development Survey 2024 data has been incorporated into research and development GFKF, leading to upwards revisions for 2023 and 2024.

GFKF measures investment in fixed assets and comprises about 25 percent of GDP-E. Updates to GFKF flow through to also impact measures of Consumption of Fixed Capital (CFK), capital stocks, and in some cases to accumulation-account entries such as catastrophic losses.

Balance of payments and trade data

The recently released annual updates to balance of payments and trade data are included in the national accounts updates. These are:

• revisions to low-value goods import values from the March 2013 quarter onwards after an update and improvement to the estimation methodology
• revisions to travel services exports from the September 2022 quarter onwards
• revisions to the transport services import and export series from the September 2016 quarter due to updated respondent data
• revisions to insurance services and current transfers back to the March 2021 quarter
• updated investment income estimates from the June 2023 quarter to reflect latest income-tax-return information received from Inland Revenue
• the inclusion of updated respondent data back to the September 2017 quarter for the Quarterly International Investment Survey (QIIS)
• all seasonally adjusted series in Balance of payments and international investment position: June 2025 quarter. The main update was the removal of additive outlier treatment for some seasonally adjusted series from the September 2022 quarter onwards, including services exports, travel services exports, travel services imports, and transport services imports.

2025 balance of payments and national accounts: Data sources and methods and International trade: June 2025 quarter - data sources and methods also have more information.

Provisional annual data for the year ended 2025

Provisional annual data for the 2025 March year for GDP-E and total economy components of GDP-I will be published with Gross domestic product: September 2025 quarter on 18 December 2025. Remaining provisional annual data, including institutional sector accounts, will be published together with the experimental quarterly National accounts (income, saving, assets, and liabilities): September 2025 quarter on 15 January 2026.

Updates on income and expenditure by institutional sector

Treatment of adverse weather events in January and February 2023

As noted in our previous national accounts improvements paper, insurance flows relating to the adverse weather events of January and February 2023 are recorded as capital transfers in our national accounts. We have revised the adjustments to claims we made in the previous year for 2023 and included new adjustments for 2024. This is based on data we have from the 2024 AES returns, particularly for insurance companies with balance dates ending in December and March, and reports from the Insurance Council of New Zealand. The updated information tells us more about the timing of the recognition of insurance claims related to Cyclone Gabrielle and the Auckland floods.

Super-dividends

In the June 2024 quarter publication of the experimental national accounts (income, saving, assets, and liabilities) release we indicated that we would provide an update on a review of the treatment of super-dividends in our annual and quarterly accounts. This review is ongoing, and we have chosen not to implement any method improvements at this time.

According to the System of National Accounts 2008, super-dividends are dividends significantly in excess of earnings or past dividend payments. These should not be included as primary income in the income and outlay account but should however be recorded in the financial account as a withdrawal of equity.

Effects of revisions on household saving

The revisions to household saving are being driven by updates and improvements in several related components:

• An upwards revision to household consumption expenditure (HCE) means household saving is revised down. As described above, for the year ended March 2024, updates and improvements added $140 million to the most recently published HCE figure (with June quarter GDP published in September 2025), while the 2023 HCE was revised down by $735 million.
• For the year ended March 2024, updates and improvements to compensation of employees (COE) received by households reduced the series by $180 million, when compared with provisional estimates published in January 2025. In 2023, COE has been revised up by $389 million. A downwards revision to COE means household saving decreases, while an upwards revision will increase household saving.
• Gross mixed income (GMI) for non-financial business enterprises has been revised up by $2.3 billion, compared with previously published provisional estimates for 2024 (published in January 2025). This results in an upwards revision to entrepreneurial income or the net residual income available to businesses to distribute back to households. An upwards revision to entrepreneurial income means that household saving also increases by a similar amount.
• Miscellaneous current transfers receivable and payable were revised upwards for the year ended March 2019 to 2023 due to the incorporation of HES numbers from 2019 to 2023.

Balance sheets and accumulation accounts

There are changes to balance sheet values for all sectors, due mostly to updated input data. Additional changes are as follows:

• Balance sheet values for insurance - as noted earlier in this paper, insurance companies are now reporting on a new reporting standard known as IFRS17. IFRS17 has had a larger impact on insurance companies' reporting of insurance technical reserve assets and liabilities than it has had on their reporting of insurance claims and premiums. The implications of this for our balance sheets release are still being worked through.
• Property assets - residential land and building assets are allocated across sectors according to population census tenure proportions. From 2019 onwards, these proportions have been updated to reflect 2023 Census information. Values for residential and non-residential properties have also revised due to updated rateable value estimates from Cotality.
• Produced non-financial assets - as noted earlier in this paper, updates to GFKF flow through to impact stocks and flows of produced non-financial assets. We have improved our method for estimating provisional year capital stocks which are included in the National accounts (income and expenditure) release. This update also improves the quality of quarterly estimates of consumption of fixed capital and capital stock estimates (CFK) for the provisional year and beyond. We have also corrected the sector classification of some government-owned transport-equipment assets, which impacts the sector splits of capital stocks and CFK estimates.

Main updates to quarterly gross domestic product

This section outlines the improvements that will be included in Gross domestic product: September 2025 quarter.

Overview of quarterly GDP (QGDP) publication

GDP is New Zealand's official measure of economic growth. The production measure of GDP (GDP-P) refers to the volume of goods and services produced in the economy. The expenditure measure of GDP (GDP-E) shows where these goods and services were used. The income measure of GDP (GDP-I) shows the sum of the generation of income accounts components of compensation of employees, gross operating surplus, gross mixed income, and taxes on production and imports less subsidies.

Both quarterly GDP-P and GDP-E are expressed in volume terms (that is, with the impact of price changes removed). Quarterly GDP-E is also expressed in current price terms (that is, expressed in the price at which the transaction took place). Quarterly GDP-I is expressed in current price terms.

Recent annual and quarterly updates to New Zealand's balance of payments and international investment statistics were incorporated into quarterly GDP estimates in the June 2025 quarter.

2025 balance of payments and national accounts: Data sources and methods and International trade: June 2025 quarter - data sources and methods have more information on these recent updates.

We will provide an indication of how current price data from National accounts (industry production and investment): Year ended March 2024 and National accounts (income and expenditure): Year ended March 2025 will translate to volumes (excluding impact of price changes). This will be included in a paper planned for release at the end of November 2025.

This paper will also include the impact of any quarterly method and data-source improvements that we intend to implement for the September quarter release. This year, this is limited to some updates to the indicator series used for deriving gross fixed capital formation (GFKF) for the other construction and non-residential building assets.

Further information will be provided in Gross domestic product: September 2025 quarter, which will be released on 18 December 2025.

Annual benchmark updates

Many quarterly GDP-P, GDP-E, and GDP-I components are based on quarterly short-term indicator series. Detailed annual national accounts data are used as annual benchmarks for reconciling the short-term indicator series. The annual benchmarks are also used to weight these short-term indicator series to ensure that quarterly GDP estimates reflect changes in the structure of New Zealand's economy over time. The release of updated annual national accounts data allows for these annual benchmarks to be refreshed each year in the September quarter GDP release.

The new quarterly GDP benchmarks will reflect:

• provisional data for GDP-E for the year ended March 2025
• balanced data for the year ended March 2024
• final balanced data for the year ended March 2023
• other historical updates introduced into annual national account series before 2023.

The effects of these changes will be published in Gross domestic product: September 2025 quarter on 18 December 2025.

Updates to quarterly indicators for gross fixed capital formation

We have updated our methods to improve quarterly data for investment on the City Rail Link project. This update accompanies the changes to the treatment of the project in our annual GFKF that were mentioned earlier in the paper, and impacts estimates of non-residential building and other construction GFKF.

We have also reviewed and updated how our compilation process includes other indicators for government-owned other-construction investment.

These changes improve alignment between quarterly and annual estimates, which is expected to reduce the size of revisions when new annual benchmarks are incorporated in future years.

Other associated statistics

These improvements will also affect other related national accounts and environmental accounts releases:

• Tourism satellite account: Year ended March 2025 (scheduled for 3 March 2026)
• Environmental-economic accounts: Data to 2024 (scheduled for 5 March 2026)
• Regional gross domestic product: Year ended March 2025 (scheduled for 24 March 2026)
• Productivity statistics: 1978-2025 (scheduled for 23 April 2026).

ISBN 978-1-991307-85-9

Enquiries

Mark Williamson
[email protected]
03 964 8478