Number of disabled people in New Zealand

A disabled person in this survey is a person with a self-reported (or caregiver-reported for children) long-term difficulty in at least one of the functional domains for their age-group. Where answer options are scaled, the amount of difficulty reported needs to meet a specified threshold.
A functional domain is an aspect of human functioning that is assessed as part of a method for identifying disabled people in a data collection like a survey.
A household in this survey is either one person who usually lives alone, or two or more people who usually live together and share facilities (such as for eating, cooking, or a living area, and bathroom and toilet) and are living in either a private dwelling or in a residential and community care facility.

Estimates from the 2023 survey can’t be compared with estimates from previous disability surveys run by Stats NZ due to changes in the way disabled people were identified. The 2023 survey used questions based on those developed by the Washington Group on Disability Statistics (WG). The WG’s work is supported by the United Nations Statistical Commission to improve statistics about disabled people. Shorter versions of the WG question sets are used in other social surveys in New Zealand. This is the first time the 2023 survey has identified disabled people with questions based on those developed by the WG, which means that results can’t be compared with those from previous disability surveys.