Crown financial statements · year ended 30 June 2025
Where do New Zealand's
tax dollars go?
In 2024/25 the New Zealand Government spent $141.7 billion — $4,492 every second, around the clock. That's $26,607 for every person in the country. Here is where it went, dollar by dollar.
Spending · core Crown expenses
Break down the $141.7b
Every bar is sized by what it costs — if it looks short, it is short. Select an area to see what it covers and what it costs you, then open it up to see every major payment and programme inside it.
Revenue · taxes and levies
Where the money comes from
Before it can be spent, it has to be collected. Taxes and levies brought in $130.8 billion in 2024/25 — nearly half of it income tax on individuals. Select a row for the detail.
Taxes and levies (sovereign revenue, total Crown). The Crown also earned about $39b from investments, ACC-style levies shown here, and sales of goods and services across the wider state sector.
The balance
The books don't balance
Core Crown spending ($141.7b) ran $7.3b ahead of core Crown revenue ($134.4b) in 2024/25. The difference is covered by borrowing — and the interest on past borrowing is now one of the government's biggest bills.
The hatched end is the shortfall: $7.3b of spending not covered by revenue. The official operating deficit (OBEGAL) was −$14.0b once the wider state sector is included.
What would paying it off take?
The calculator starts where New Zealand actually is: repaying nothing — net debt last fell in 2017/18. Drag the repayment up to see what clearing $182b of net core Crown debt would take, and try different interest rates.
How many billion dollars the government puts toward the debt each year — money it would have to find by spending less or taxing more.
4.4% is the average rate implied by 2024/25's finance costs. Each extra 1% costs about $1.8b a year.
Simplified on purpose: one average rate on net core Crown debt of $182b, steady payments, and no new borrowing — in reality the Crown borrows at market rates as old debt rolls over, and is still adding to the pile.
What's left to pay
Where each year's payment goes
Twenty-five years of money in, money out — and the debt
Through the 2000s the books ran surpluses and net debt fell to just $10b. The global financial crisis and Canterbury earthquakes drove a decade of borrowing; things had almost levelled out by 2019 — then COVID-19 hit, and the debt has tripled since.
Your share
Follow your own tax
Enter your income and see how your income tax splits across everything the government does — assuming your dollars are spent the same way as everyone else's.
Uses 2025–26 income tax rates (from 1 April 2025). Income tax only — GST, ACC levies and tax credits (like the IETC) aren't included, so your real contribution is higher.
About
About the numbers
Where they come from
Everything here is drawn from the audited Financial Statements of the Government of New Zealand for the year ended 30 June 2025 (B.11), published by the Treasury in October 2025.
The headline figures are core Crown expenses by functional classification — spending by ministers, departments, Parliament, the NZ Superannuation Fund and the Reserve Bank. State-owned enterprises and Crown entities (for example ACC's claims payments) sit outside it; including them, total Crown expenses were $183.5 billion.
The welfare breakdown combines the transfer-payment detail in Note 8 with the functional total (overseas aid is shown under core government services, where it is classified); “welfare services & administration” is the derived remainder. Items marked ≈ are derivations like this.
The breakdowns inside the other areas come from the Government's own appropriation data (2024/25 actuals, published with Budget 2026), grouped by the same functional classification. Appropriations are a slightly different accounting basis, so those items are shown as the largest lines in each area rather than an exact reconciliation. KiwiSaver pass-through payments — members' own contributions handled by Inland Revenue — are excluded.
Per-person figures use Stats NZ's estimated resident population of 5,324,700 at 30 June 2025. The 25-year history comes from the Treasury's Fiscal Time Series. The tax calculator uses 2025–26 income tax rates (from 1 April 2025) and covers personal income tax only — not GST, ACC levies or tax credits.
Use the data
The year's dataset behind this site is public: taxdollars.nz/data/2025.json. Source data is Crown copyright under CC BY 4.0.
Years
New financial statements are published each October — more years will appear here as the series grows.