Child Poverty - Children living in households with severe material hardship 2013–2022

Severe material hardship is defined as having a DEP-17 score of nine or more.

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.

Data for the year ended June 2020 is only for nine months, to March 2020, due to being unable to collect data for the household economic survey (HES) during the COVID-19 lockdown. Stats NZ investigated the quality of the data that has been collected and are confident in the data’s ability to give a clear picture of child poverty prior to the COVID-19 lockdown.

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 to the 2018/19 year, 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.

Data collection of the Household Economic Survey for the year ended June 2022 (the source of child poverty statistics) was significantly reduced due to COVID-19 alert level restrictions, lockdowns, and other disruptions, meaning Stats.NZ were unable to conduct face-to-face interviewing for much of the data collection period. The achieved sample size was 8,900 households, whereas the target sample size for the survey is 20,000 households.
Stats NZ has not produced child poverty statistics by regional council area for year 2022 and advises users that there is greater uncertainty on statistics for demographic groups than previous years.

At URL provided, select 'Child poverty statistics: Year ended June 2022' Excel file.

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), a sample survey of more than 20,000 households across New Zealand. The HES was conducted over 12 months, from July 2019 to March 2020, and collected annual income for people aged 15 years and over for the 12 months prior to the interview. This means that the incomes of households interviewed in 2019 include some income from 2018, and only the very last households interviewed include income from the entire 2019/20 year.