Travelling by car, truck or van was the most common way to get to work in 2023. But when it came to using public transport – this was most common among workers in Wellington (19.1%). In Auckland, 9.5% of people travelled to work by public transport. 

Stats NZ's new platform (announced in a press release by Minister Bayly yesterday) Aotearoa Data Explorer is back up and working again.

Telephone use - or landlines – has dropped dramatically in recent years and is now around half the rate of what it was in 2018. In 2023, 31% of households reported having a landline – compared with 62.5% at the time of the 2018 Census.

Chatham Islands is the only area where landline use remains high – at 73.1%.

There has been a substantial increase in the use of energy-efficient heating – with around two-thirds of private dwellings (66.8%) having a heat pump, up from 47.3% in 2018.

More than 350,000 people affiliate with one of New Zealand's three largest iwi. These are Ngāpuhi with 184,470 people (19.3%), Ngāti Porou with 102,480 (10.7%) and Ngāi Tahu with 84,969 (8.9%).

For the first time since the New Zealand census began to collect religious affiliations, more than half of the population had no religion (at the time of the 2023 Census).

The number of people who identify as Christian dropped from 36.5% of the population in 2018 to 32.3% in the latest Census. The other largest religious groupings were Hindu (2.9%) and Islam (1.5%).

Nine in ten people had access to the internet in 2023. However, access varies by area and was lower in more rural districts. Buller district on the West Coast, and Ruapehu district in the central North Island, had the lower internet access rates at 79.9% and 80.9% respectively.

The only region in New Zealand where residents reported an increase in dampness and mould in their homes was Gisborne. All other regions reported a decrease.

Stats NZ principal analyst Rosemary Goodyear said the region was hit particularly hard during the cyclone events of 2023 and did not follow the national trend.

Gisborne reported the highest rate of dampness at least some of the time - from 26.4% in 2018 to 30% in 2023. Reports of mould over A4 size increased from 21.3% to 23.4% over this time

Data from the 2023 Census shows a decrease in the number of people who report living with dampness in their homes – from 21.5% in 2018 to 18.1% in 2023.

For mould, one in seven homes in 2023 (14%) had mould larger than the size of an A4 piece of paper - compared to 1 in 6 or 16.9% in 2018.

Auckland had the country's lowest home ownership rates in 2023 of all regions – at 59.5% - which was largely unchanged from the 2018 rate of 59.4%.