How much does the government spend?
Government spending were $141.7 billion (The Treasury (New Zealand), 2024/25).
Updated
Expenses of the core Crown on an accrual basis from 1994. Treasury notes these include items such as depreciation on physical assets but not capital spending.
Excludes capital spending (e.g. building a hospital is not an expense in the year it is built; depreciation is). Before 1994 the comparable measure is cash "financial net expenditure", which is not directly comparable.
Dividing a national total by population puts it on a human scale. Spending per person is an average across the country; the amount spent on each person varies with their circumstances.
Read the period beside each number before comparing it with another figure. A monthly observation, a quarterly result and a financial year cover different spans of time. The latest release can also revise earlier observations. The chart and downloads keep the published periods so you can check which figures are being compared. A change in spending describes what happened during that period; it does not by itself explain why it happened or identify the effect of a government policy. Definitions and coverage matter as much as the size of a change.
Government spending was $138,998 million in 2023/24, a year earlier.
The earliest observation on the same basis was $44,660 million in 2004/05.
Spending: definitions
Expenses of the core Crown on an accrual basis from 1994. Treasury notes these include items such as depreciation on physical assets but not capital spending.
- Excludes capital spending (e.g. building a hospital is not an expense in the year it is built; depreciation is).
- Before 1994 the comparable measure is cash "financial net expenditure", which is not directly comparable.
- Accounting basis changes in 1997 (IFRS), 2005 (PBE restatement) and 2019/2020 (new PBE standards).
Show the figures
| Period | Core Crown expenses ($m) |
|---|---|
| 2024/25 | $141,675 million |
| 2023/24 | $138,998 million |
| 2022/23 | $127,574 million |
| 2021/22 | $125,641 million |
| 2020/21 | $107,764 million |
| 2019/20 | $108,832 million |
| 2018/19 | $86,959 million |
| 2017/18 | $80,576 million |
| 2016/17 | $76,339 million |
| 2015/16 | $73,929 million |
| 2014/15 | $72,363 million |
| 2013/14 | $71,174 million |
| 2012/13 | $69,962 million |
| 2011/12 | $68,939 million |
| 2010/11 | $70,099 million |
| 2009/10 | $63,554 million |
| 2008/09 | $63,711 million |
| 2007/08 | $56,753 million |
| 2006/07 | $53,764 million |
| 2005/06 | $49,084 million |
Fiscal years. Year ended 31 March to 1989, year ended 30 June from 1990 (the April–June 1989 quarter falls between the two).. Source: The Treasury (New Zealand). Lines break at basis changes and missing periods.
Spending: questions for your AI
Download the data, attach it in your assistant, then paste the prompt.
The attached CSV is government spending, from The Treasury (New Zealand). Answer: How much does the government spend? Name the unit and period. Use only directly supported observations. Definitions: Expenses of the core Crown on an accrual basis from 1994. Treasury notes these include items such as depreciation on physical assets but not capital spending. Limits: Excludes capital spending (e.g. building a hospital is not an expense in the year it is built; depreciation is). Before 1994 the comparable measure is cash "financial net expenditure", which is not directly comparable. Accounting basis changes in 1997 (IFRS), 2005 (PBE restatement) and 2019/2020 (new PBE standards).
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Spending: sources
The source publication, licence and snapshot used to build this page.
- Organisation
- The Treasury (New Zealand), Fiscal Time Series – Historical Fiscal Indicators
- Licence
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: The Treasury, Fiscal Time Series – Historical Fiscal Indicators, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Figures transformed and calculated by NZ in Numbers.
- Reuse limits
- Treasury logos, emblems, trade marks and website design are not covered and must not be reused.
- Snapshot
- data/raw/treasury-hfi/2026-10-10_de59f9028a81.xlsx
- SHA256
- de59f9028a81a697ee66eea04861edfd8e2c3a7e472b3b8798d976951964f70f
- Retrieved
- 10 October 2026