Measuring child poverty: Material hardship in the Household Income and Living Survey describes the updated methodology for data from the Household Income and Living Survey, from 2024/2025 onwards.
Measuring child poverty: Material hardship describes the way material hardship was measured using data from the Household Economic Survey.
This paper provides information about changes to the methodology used to derive rates of material hardship in Aotearoa New Zealand. This follows the transition from the Household Economic Survey to the Household Income and Living Survey, which involved changes to the way data about material wellbeing is collected.
Download the PDF of the full paper below, or read the Summary of key points online.
Summary of key points
Stats NZ has made changes to the design of material wellbeing questions as part of the transition to the Household Income and Living Survey (HILS) from the Household Economic Survey (HES). These were first implemented in the now-discontinued Living in Aotearoa survey and carried over into HILS.
The changes were made with the intention of improving data quality, and include changes to questionnaire structure, respondent selection and eligibility, response options, and questionnaire wording. A subset of these material wellbeing questions is used to create an index for reporting on material hardship.
As a result of these design changes, Stats NZ has also changed the way material hardship is derived. In HES, a household was determined to be in material hardship if it was deprived of 6 or more items (out of 17) of the 'DEP-17' index. However, when using the same index and threshold in Living in Aotearoa, there were larger differences in hardship rates between HES and Living in Aotearoa than expected, that did not accurately reflect real-world change. Given that the material wellbeing questionnaire design is the same in Living in Aotearoa and HILS, Stats NZ concluded that a new methodology would be required to derive material hardship rates from HILS.
Stats NZ commissioned the Ministry of Social Development (MSD), as subject matter experts on material hardship and child poverty, to prepare a report which provides a recommended option or options for selection of a revised material hardship index. Of the options developed by MSD, Stats NZ selected the 'MH-18' index, with a threshold of 7 or more out of 18 items used to determine material hardship. MH-18 has 16 items in common with DEP-17. One item has been removed (doing without or cutting back on visits to local places, including the shops) and two new items have been added (having a good bed to sleep in, and access to a computer and the internet). The appendix in the paper provides a comparison between the suite of questions used in the indexes.
Stats NZ will publish the first child poverty statistics from HILS and the MH-18 index in February 2026.
ISBN 978-1-991431-04-2
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