Which parts of NZ have shrinking population?

Most of New Zealand is growing its population, but some of the bigger cities have been losing people and Wellington is back to a level last seen in 2017.

New Stats NZ data shows two-thirds of the country's territorial authority and Auckland local board areas experienced population growth in the year to June.

About half grew faster than they did in 2025, but the 10 fastest-growing areas were all in the South Island or Auckland.

Selwyn was top, with growth of 2.9 percent. Other fast-growing areas were Mangere-Otahuhu, Papakura, Otara-Papatoetoe and Henderson-Massey.

Stats NZ said much of Selwyn's growth came from people moving within New Zealand.

Six cities had falls in population. Wellington had the largest, down 0.6 percent, followed by Dunedin, down 0.5 percent, Nelson, Palmerston North, and Napier, all down 0.2 percent, and Porirua, down 0.1 percent.

Stats NZ said, outside Auckland, Christchurch was the largest city with 422,400 people, compared to Auckland's 1.84 million.

Infometrics principal economist Nick Brunsdon said Selwyn and Queenstown had experienced strong population growth for the past couple of decades.

"No surprises there, that's pretty standard."

He said, where people had previously talked about a "golden triangle" of Auckland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty, that was becoming a "golden baton".

"It's Auckland and Waikato, the corridor just right through to Hamilton and Cambridge, but not so much the Bay of Plenty."

He said tourism was helping grow parts of the South Island.

"We've seen Hurunui, Hamner Springs, Mackenzie, Tekapo, Southland, Fiordland and Te Anau, as well as Central Otago and Queenstown Lakes... they're all in the top 10 for population growth, which reflects that, with more tourists, you need more staff to look after them.

"You're bringing in more migration to grow the population to get the workers to do the work for the tourists that are also coming in."

Auckland's population growth was relatively unusual while the economy was weak, he said.

"For most of the other areas that have had strong population growth, we can line it up with what's happening employment-wise and say strong job growth, strong employment, strong population, it all matches up.

"Auckland still has a pretty weak economy - it's probably lagging the economic recovery nationally - and yet it has had some quite strong population growth, which is interesting."

Wellington was a standout for loss of population.

"Wellington's population is back to where it was in 2017," he said. "They've had several years in a row of population decline, a large part of that is what's happening in employment.

"The number of jobs has fallen 6000 over the past three years and a lot of people who've lost their jobs have just left. They're also not attracting people in from overseas, like they would normally."

Smaller provincial centres tended to lose their population through natural decrease.

"They already have more deaths than births, so if they're not getting a lot of migration on top of that, it means they're going backwards. The likes of Timaru, Dunedin, Gore, Stratford, those sorts of areas."

Brunsdon said internal migration did not seem to happen as in the past.

"What seems to be going on is, if people have a change in circumstances, they get itchy feet or they're not happy with how they're getting ahead in life, and they want to shake things up and see if they can get ahead financially somewhere else, right at the moment, people are more likely to say, 'It's time to go overseas to Australia' or whatever it would be, rather than 'it's time to move down to Palmerston North' or something like that."

That had been the case for Northland.

"All of the Northland territories, all the districts in Northland had very slim, practically no population growth," he said. "Normally, what would happen is you'd have a group of people in Auckland that say, 'Oh well, I'm maybe not quite happy with Auckland, it's time to move somewhere else in New Zealand'.

"You normally have quite a nice flow of people from Auckland into Northland, but that's not happening at the moment."

He said areas that lost population could struggle to find workers, when their economies improved.

"That's going to create a bit more of a pull factor that starts pulling people back out of those places like, let's say Christchurch, down to Timaru, or from Auckland into Thames Coromandel.

"I think naturally that economic recovery over the next three years will start to balance that distribution back to normal a little bit."

Retiring baby boomers would also create employment in some areas, he said.

Thames-Coromandel had historically done well pulling people out of Auckland, but had experienced a population decline over the past year.

"There's no shortage of people that want to retire and no shortage of people that want to retire to Thames Coromandel," he said.

"What I wonder is if the Auckland housing market is holding it back, because you may be thinking about or maybe you always had a dream of retiring to the Coromandel, if you're looking at an awful price for selling your house, maybe you're more likely to just sit on your hands, stay in your house and wait for the market to recover, until you can get a better price that will enable you to make that move."

Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub said places like Auckland and Christchurch had a younger population, which meant they were more likely to grow, due to more babies being born.

He said people moving into New Zealand were increasingly going to places outside Auckland, where there were more job opportunities.

"Kiwis are leaving from those places, the locals are leaving, so those skills shortages bite more in the provinces.

"Think about places like Whakatane, some of the East Cape. Regional migration is all negative there, but international migration is by and large positive.

"Nurses, doctors, people working in horticulture... the labour shortages are really binding."

He said housing supply was keeping up in places like Christchurch, but in other parts of the country that were not expecting the same population growth, houses were only built after people arrived, which created tensions.

Eaqub said the country was likely to rely increasingly on international migration for future population growth, but it was becoming a tricky political issue.

"I think, right around the world, we're seeing this kind of this pushback against high rates of immigration, because there are concerns about jobs for locals, and all those other bits and pieces.

"It's the kind of this twin pressure we've got really big issues with, young people not getting access to jobs and those kinds of things, particularly right now.

"Most of the small towns of New Zealand have massive infrastructure pressures coming down the pipe and if they don't have population growth, they won't be able to afford it."

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