Weekly Reporting
On this Page:
An overview of income support, and hardship assistance, delivered each week by the Ministry of Social Development.
The data file provides the figures used to produce the Income Support Weekly Update and includes timeseries data on main benefits, Jobseeker Support by Regional Council, and other selected data cuts.
Latest Income Support Weekly Update releases
The Income Support Weekly Updates are released each Friday at 10am. Publishing times may vary during weeks with a public holiday.
The 7 January 2022 release also includes data for the weeks ending 17, 24, and 31 December 2021. Previous reports for 2020 and 2021 have been archived, and are available on the weekly reporting archive page.
Income Support Weekly Update - A3
Income Support Weekly Update - Data file
Wage Subsidy August 2021 reporting
As a result of the most recent lockdown, there has been higher demand for information on engagement with MSD’s services, particularly around the Wage Subsidy. To support this, we have published an additional analysis:
Wage Subsidy Scheme employee information
Analysis of demographic, regional and industry information of employees supported by the Wage Subsidy Scheme.
How we report ethnicity
From December 2021, we have implemented an approach called ‘total response’, which allows us to recognise all aspects of someone’s ethnicity. This will reflect our clients more accurately, align our approach with Statistics NZ’s reporting and reflect best practice.
Ethnicity is about people’s identity and sense of belonging. Ethnicity measures cultural affiliation, rather than race, ancestry, nationality, or citizenship. Ethnicity is self-perceived and people can identify with more than one ethnic group. Previously, we reported ethnicity using an approach called ‘prioritised ethnicity’. Prioritised ethnicity means that we allocate people to a single ethnic group in an order of priority. The priority used by MSD was Māori, Pacific Peoples, Other and NZ European.
Protecting client information - confidentiality
All information in the Income Support Weekly Update has been randomly rounded to base 3. The information found in the supporting data file has been rounded independently from the Income Support Weekly Update A3.
From 12 February 2021, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is applying a range of new confidentiality procedures to public data releases. These procedures will continue to protect client information, while making more data available. To find out how we have changed the way we work with client information visit:
