LEED - Main earnings source by industry, age group, sex, and region 2000–2023

Main earnings source by industry: The industry code assigned to a worker corresponds to the industry that had most earnings for the individual in the tax year. Median earnings is from all of an individual’s jobs, not just from their main industry. It is from the sum of earnings from wages and salaries and self-employment if the individual has both of these sources.
Person counts: a continuous measure of wage and salary earners. This may be higher than those from published quarterly job statistics. Quarterly jobs statistics represent a snapshot of the 15th of the middle month of the quarter, and do not include employees who were working outside this date. However, person counts in the annual statistics account for these workers because counts are over the tax year.
Tax year: April 1 to March 31.

Note that all median earnings and income figures presented in this data are before tax.

The term ‘sources of income’ in this report does not cover all possible income sources for New Zealanders. It includes incomes that have had tax deducted at source – specifically, incomes that are paid or transferred through the EMS, and self-employment income reported through annual tax returns. In summary, the sources of income are:
- wages and salaries paid to employees
- self-employment
- paid parental leave
- student allowances
- New Zealand Superannuation (including veterans’ pensions)
- ACC payments
- income-tested benefits.

For inclusion in the LEED annual statistics, a person must:
- be aged 15 years and over at the start of the tax year (to ensure earnings and incomes for 15-year-olds are not artificially biased downwards)
- have received non-zero income with tax deducted at source through the EMS system, or self-employment income in the reference period
- have a valid IRD identifier.
The population for the annual statistics covers all individuals who either receive income from which tax is deducted at source, or from self-employment. These payments are made by organisations that are registered with Inland Revenue. The population for the annual statistics covers approximately 96 percent of the estimated working-age population aged 15 years and over.

Other sources of income not covered:
- investment income
- undeclared wages and salaries
- income earned overseas.

Data is displayed at URL provided. To create this dataset, click on download and “unfiltered data in tabular text (CSV)”.

To produce person-level data, LEED is augmented with self-employment data. LEED is created by linking a longitudinal series of Inland Revenue’s Employer Monthly Schedule (EMS) to employer data from Statistics New Zealand's Business Frame (BF). Official statistics produced from LEED every quarter measure labour market dynamics, providing an insight into the operation of New Zealand's labour market at the job level.

Tax data used in the annual statistics is obtained from:
(i.) The EMS which contains information about monthly employee earnings and earnings of individuals taxed at source. It does not contain any information relating to the number of hours worked for those earnings. Many types of government transfer payments are also made through the EMS and can be identified separately. These are income-tested benefits, New Zealand superannuation, student allowances, paid parental leave and Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) payments. About 9 percent of self-employed persons are reported as 'employees' in the EMS.
(ii.) Annual tax returns relating to the tax year. This data is added when processing of all relevant annual tax forms is close to completion. The majority of self-employment data is sourced from annual returns.