Households on JobSeeker Support or NZ Super alone spend more than they have coming in. Photo: RNZ
Households living on JobSeeker Support or NZ Super alone have to spend more each week than they have coming in to cover the basics, on average, a new report says.
Ka Mākona, the Zero Hunger Collective, has issued its latest annual report, which notes that 27 percent of children are living in food-insecure households.
This year, older people have been added to the household scenarios, modelling weekly income and basic housing, food, transport and utilities expenses for an older person living alone and an older couple.
Single adults, sole parents with two children and two-parent households with two children were also considered.
Housing costs are based on rents for a single adult living in a shared flat, an older person in a one-room unit and an older couple in a two-bedroom house. Family households are based on three-bedroom rentals.
"2025 has seen continued escalation in costs of living, as income increases failed to keep pace with inflation," the report said. "The combination of economic recession, job losses and government policy settings cumulatively see many households and whānau trapped in a continual struggle to meet basic costs."
Researcher Jennie Sim found all modelled households on JobSeeker Support and NZ Super had a weekly deficit.
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For a single adult on JobSeeker, it was $107 a week on average across the country.
A solo parent with two kids on JobSeeker had a deficit of $21.42. A two-parent household with two kids on JobSeeker had a weekly deficit of $111.15.
A single person on NZ Super was short $17.67 and a couple on NZ Super was short $35.85.
In Auckland, a sole parent on JobSeeker was not in deficit.
Sim said the cost of housing was a big problem for many.
"If rents came down, people would have more to give to other fixed costs and to feed themselves, and maybe have something left for the variable costs of life, but at the moment, housing consumes so much.
"In terms of rent, Christchurch has jumped something like $160 in five years for a family three-bedroom home. There's no way their income has gone up anywhere near that much."
The report also highlighted problems with women's income adequacy.
Sim said many women were on the back foot from the start, because female-dominated professions, such as nursing and teaching, required students to go through unpaid placements.
"Unpaid placement in the female-dominated fields of teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work cause hardship and food insecurity, especially where students are paying fees and also paying for extra housing costs, where placement is away from home.
"Unpaid placements and low starting wages in these professions cause lifelong financial setbacks for women - for the first 8-12 years working in these fields, women would be better off financially as a minimum wage worker.
"For the first 14-28 years, the effective cumulative salary is less than a police officer - who is paid to train, has no debt and no degree. After 20 years on average, their superannuation will be about a quarter of a police officer's."
She said cuts to funding for community food organisations and budget advisory services noted in 2024 meant some frontline support agencies closed, once they exhausted their funding reserves.
"The remaining organisations have stretched their reduced resources to cover the extra need, but many support services are near breaking point. Many report a significant increase in older people and two-income families coming for assistance in the past year.
"Women parenting alone continue to be among those who experience food insecurity the most."
New Zealand Food Network chief executive Gavin Findlay said he had heard from recipient food hubs that they were getting more requests for food than last year.
"It's not trending down as we thought perhaps it might have been, because we did see a kind of a little plateau, even though that plateau was still quite a high level of demand and certainly higher than before Covid."
He said it was probably related to the cost of living.
"Maybe it's eroded people's ability to help themselves and serve themselves… perhaps the rest of the family are tapped out as well."
He said lower-income people were not alone looking for help with food.
"It's not limited to necessarily the households, people that you would think it'd be limited to," Findlay said. "It's having an effect across a whole range of people who are struggling with the overall costs that they have to deal with."
Findlay said more than half-a-million people a month accessed some form of food support.
"That's not all meals every day. It could be once a week, it could be twice a week or three times a week.
"It's still one in 10 people in New Zealand, [and] one in three or four Pasifika households or Māori households struggling as well."
Financial mentor David Verry said falling interest rates were helping homeowners with mortgages, but no-one else was seeing an improvement.
"Arguably, things have got more difficult with the Winter Energy Payments having ceased for all beneficiaries, including pensioners, and yet we are still getting cold snaps coming through.
"People's ability to supplement their income with part-time jobs isn't getting any better."
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