Child Poverty - Children living in households with low income and material hardship 2013–2023

Income: This data refers to the equivalised disposable household income. It is the household income divided by a factor that takes into account household size and composition. This is to allow living standards to be compared across households.
DEP-17 score: The DEP-17 index focuses on the low living standards end of the spectrum and includes questions about ‘enforced lack of essentials’, ‘economised, cut back, or delayed purchases a lot’, ‘in arrears more than once in last 12 months’, and ‘financial stress and vulnerability’. For more information: https://www.stats.govt.nz/methods/measuring-child-poverty-material-hardship#appendix2
'Material hardship' is defined as having a DEP-17 score of six or more, while 'Severe material hardship' is defined as having a DEP-17 score of nine or more.
Housing costs: Total housing costs consist of expenditure on mortgage payments, rent payments, property rates payments, and payments associated with building-related insurance.
AHC: After housing costs.
BHC: Before housing costs.

https://www.stats.govt.nz/methods/measuring-child-poverty-concepts-and-definitions

Stats NZ emphasises the need to look at the general trend over time and caution against reaching definitive conclusions from reported year-on-year changes.
Due to its relatively small sample size prior for some years, the underlying data source (i.e. the Household Economic Survey) was not able to deliver robust results when more precision is required in a given year.
The Household Economic Survey tends to have lower response rates from households in low socio-economic areas, which means that these households are often underrepresented in the sample.

After thorough data quality analysis, the child poverty statistics for the year ended June 2023 were deemed fit-for-purpose, but users should note that margins of error are higher than designed for. This is especially true for smaller groups such as tamariki Māori, Pacific children, and disabled children. Furthermore, estimates of annual change have larger sample errors than in previous years due to the significantly reduced sample size for the year ended June 2022.

Stats NZ typically publishes child poverty statistics by regional council area. While these are published for the year ended June 2023, data quality concerns associated with the previous year mean that annual changes are not available.

At URL provided, select 'Child poverty statistics: Year ended June 2023' csv file.
Figure.nz appended csv files into one excel file for processing purposes.

Child poverty statistics provide estimates of low income and material hardship rates for measures listed in the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018.

Statistics in this release are used as baseline rates by Government to set 3- and 10-year targets for reducing child poverty for the three primary measures specified in the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018.

These statistics are based on the household economic survey (HES). The achieved sample size in 2022/2023 was approximately 14,100 households, whereas the designed target sample size for the survey is 20,000 households.