New Zealand has never measured hardship among older adults, and a new report makes a start. About 168,000 New Zealanders aged 65 and over have put off going to a doctor or a dentist because of the cost. That is nearly one in five people in that age group.
The number comes from the Older Persons Poverty Monitor, published by the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services and written by R P Mackay, A N Sudden, K E C P Schraders and M J Wilson. It is the first attempt to measure poverty among older adults in this country in any consistent way.
New Zealand has measured child poverty in law for years, with agreed indicators and annual reporting against them. There has never been an equivalent for adults. The gap mattered in practice. When people working in aged care and community services said hardship among their clients was worsening, there was no figure to test the claim against, and no way to tell whether a policy change had helped.
How the measure was built
NZCCSS began with a definition rather than a dataset, consulting its member organisations, sector partners, academics and older people themselves. What they settled on is broader than income: older persons poverty as the state of having insufficient resources, security and support in one’s community to live, age and die with dignity.
From that came a framework of five domains (income, essentials, housing, connection and health) with two measures in each, making ten in total. The breadth is intentional. An older person who owns their home, lives on a modest but adequate pension and sees almost nobody from one week to the next does not register in an income statistic. Under this framework they do.
The first set of numbers
Just under 12% of over-65s, about 102,000 people, live on less than half the median household income once housing costs are deducted.
Around 25,000 are in material hardship as Stats NZ measures it, scoring seven or more on an 18-item index covering things like meeting an unexpected $500 expense, going without meat in meals, or putting up with feeling cold. That is 2.93% of the age group.
Housing accounts for much of the pressure. Some 147,000 people over 65, or 17.25%, live in a home they do not own. Another 52,000 spend more than 40% of their income on accommodation. Of those getting help with the cost, 52,755 receive the Accommodation Supplement, and 76,000 Special Needs Grants were paid to over-65s during the 2025 calendar year.
NZCCSS chief executive Alicia Sudden told RNZ the findings should change the terms of the discussion. “It should not be acceptable that tens of thousands of people reach retirement and still cannot afford healthcare, secure housing or the basic essentials of everyday life,” she said.
Who it affects most
Women score worse than men on all ten measures. Most of the individual gaps are narrow. Some 12.11% of older women are in income poverty against 10.40% of older men, and 1.88% report persistent loneliness against 1.42%. The consistency is the finding, rather than the size of any one gap.
The differences by ethnicity are wider. Pacific people over 65 are the most likely of any group to be in material hardship, at 19.09%, compared with 2.03% of older Europeans. More than half of older Pacific people, 57.27%, live in a home they do not own, as do 38.59% of older Māori. Māori rank second-worst across every measure in the Monitor.
Counted as individuals rather than as rates, the picture looks different. Europeans account for 78,000 of the 102,000 people in income poverty, and 14,000 of those in material hardship, because there are far more older Europeans in the population. Both sets of figures are accurate, and they answer different questions. One is about the size of the problem, the other about who is most exposed to it.
Regionally, of the areas with reportable data, Northland has the highest rate of material hardship at 7.09%, and Taranaki the second highest at 4.24%. Canterbury has the lowest at 1.76%. Numbers in Gisborne, the West Coast, Otago and Southland were too small to publish.
The measure that was hardest to find
Connection proved the most difficult domain to quantify, and it was the one older people raised most often themselves. At the Rauawaawa Kaumātua Charitable Trust Games in 2025, NZCCSS asked nearly 400 kaumātua to complete the line “Older Persons Poverty is…”.
Social isolation and separation from whānau made up a third of all the answers. Several described being cut off from grandchildren.
The nearest available data was a question in Stats NZ’s General Social Survey about feeling lonely at least most of the time. On that measure 15,000 older New Zealanders qualify, 1.76% of the age group, rising to 3.00% among those over 85. A further 49,000 reported age-related discrimination.
The distance between what people described and what could be counted is worth keeping in mind across the whole report. The Monitor draws on several sources collected at different times. The income and hardship figures come from the 2025 Household Income and Living Survey, and the loneliness figure from the 2023 General Social Survey. It is a composite rather than a single survey, and this edition is a baseline, so it shows a position rather than a direction.
What happens next
The Monitor will be updated annually and sits alongside an interactive dashboard. NZCCSS has published it with a call for a Poverty Reduction Act, which would require the government to identify and track groups in hardship in the way child poverty is already tracked.
There is a more immediate use in the figures. The Accommodation Supplement, Special Needs Grants, the Community Services Card and the Rates Rebate all appear in this data, claimed by tens of thousands of older New Zealanders, and eligibility for several of them is wider than people assume.
A respondent to a Good Shepherd New Zealand study on older women living alone, quoted in the report, described how a week gets managed: “I pay all my bills on a Wednesday, then I get my food, and then I’m counting pennies by Friday.”
The next Monitor is due in a year. It will be the first one able to show whether any of this has shifted.
