Homelessness insights report September 2025

Last updated: 16 December 2025 This is the third iteration of the six-monthly homelessness insights report, which focuses on people living without shelter.

The report provides insights and data to better understand and address homelessness in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The report includes:

A description of some of the programmes and initiatives funded, planned or underway that contribute to addressing homelessness.
Government-held data, including:
- new area breakdowns of 2023 Census living without shelter estimates
- housing-related service use data from the Ministry of Social Development and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development
- short summaries of data from the Department of Corrections and Oranga Tamariki
- provisional figures from Health New Zealand – Te Whatu Ora.
Council and provider data, including:
- recent local figures from around the country
- themes and context from group sessions with council staff and non-government organisations who work with young people, as well as sector insights
- short summaries of data from refuge providers.
Broader system insights and recent research and reports of interest.

Care needs to be taken when reading this report

People living without shelter can be very transient and their circumstances may change from night to night. This combined with a history of trauma that leaves many with a distrust in authority, means that it can be very difficult to quantify this group.

This report is a collation of available data and observations from around the country. The different data sources are not standardised and they have various strengths and weaknesses. However, the intention of bringing the data and observations together is to provide a sense of the overall trends.

The Ministry and Stats NZ are working together to determine how we may improve measurement of severe housing deprivation over time, likely including a mix of survey questions, administrative data and other tailored solutions such as point-in-time counts.

Further breakdowns of the 2023 severe housing deprivation estimates

We have produced further breakdowns of the 2023 severe housing deprivation estimates for territorial authority and Auckland local board areas. These are available for gender, age group and disability indicator from data.govt.nz(external link)