Disabled adults in New Zealand who experience difficulties with sensory functions

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.
Disability prevalence rate: the percentage of the total household population in each demographic group (eg, male adults) that was disabled. Percentages are calculated on unrounded numbers.
Functional domain: an aspect of human functioning that is assessed as part of a method for identifying disabled people in a data collection like a survey.

People who only belong to an ethnic group other than European, Māori, Pacific, or Asian, or whose ethnic group is unknown, are included in the total column only. Ethnicity data comes from Census 2023.
People with a gender other than male or female, or where gender was not provided, are included in the total estimates only.

This dataset is only representative of people living in households. ‘Households’ refers to people who live alone or with others in either private dwellings or community-based residential care facilities (these are living arrangements where people are supported to live in the community). The survey did not survey people living in aged-care facilities and long-stay hospitals or in other non-private dwellings (eg, hotels, university halls, and prisons).

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.

The 2023 Household Disability Survey (HDS) was designed to provide estimates of disability prevalence among people living in New Zealand households, and information about their experiences and needs.
The HDS is an important source of official statistics about disabled people in New Zealand and helps to show how well they are faring compared with non-disabled people.
The 2023 HDS sample was selected from the 2023 Census of Population and Dwellings (2023 Census).