The Bay of Plenty has knocked Canterbury off the top of New Zealand’s regional economy table, with a bumper kiwifruit harvest and steady jobs growth lifting the sunshine region back to first place.
The ranking comes from ASB’s latest Regional Economic Scoreboard, which measures 16 regions across employment, construction, house prices, retail trade and consumer confidence for the three months ended March. The Bay of Plenty came first, followed by Canterbury and then Otago, RNZ reported. The result ends a run of two straight quarters with Canterbury on top.
ASB chief economist Nick Tuffley pinned the rise on the region’s orchards. “After a bumper 2025 kiwifruit season and a strong start to 2026, the Bay of Plenty has reclaimed the top spot,” he said. Strong export demand, solid employment growth, busy building sites and firmer retail spending all added to the picture, with the housing market also picking up.
It is a familiar story for anyone who has watched the Bay grow over the past decade. The region is the heart of New Zealand’s kiwifruit industry, and the long packing season that runs from autumn into winter floods Te Puke, Katikati and the wider Western Bay with seasonal work and orchard income. When the fruit sells well overseas, the money flows back through contractors, packhouses, transport firms and main street shops. A strong crop does not just lift growers, it ripples across the whole local economy.
Tauranga, the country’s largest export port by volume, sits at the centre of all of it. Logs, kiwifruit, dairy and other goods move through the harbour and out to markets in Asia, Europe and beyond, and the city around the port has been one of the fastest growing in the country. That growth has brought construction cranes, new subdivisions and a steady stream of people relocating from Auckland and elsewhere in search of cheaper housing and a warmer climate.
Canterbury, which slipped to second, is hardly struggling. ASB said the region remained well supported by a strong dairy sector, ongoing population growth, a healthy tourism trade and continued investment. After leading the table for the previous two quarters, a single drop to second place looks more like the Bay of Plenty surging than Canterbury fading. The Christchurch economy has been one of the more resilient in the country since the post-quake rebuild years, and the wider region keeps drawing new residents.
Otago held on to third, helped by retail spending and a tourism trade that has clawed its way back since the border reopened, although ASB noted that jobs growth in the region had softened a little. Queenstown and the surrounding lakes district remain heavily tied to visitor numbers, so any wobble in international arrivals tends to show up quickly in the local figures.
There were also some early signs of life in Auckland, which has been a drag on the national economy for much of the past two years. Population growth and more confident consumers helped lift housing, retail and construction activity in the city, even though employment and house sales stayed on the soft side. Given that Auckland is home to roughly a third of the country’s people and a large share of its economic output, any genuine recovery there matters well beyond the city limits.
Tuffley described the overall picture as more even than it has been for some time. “The regional story this quarter is one of a more balanced recovery,” he said, noting that five of the North Island’s eight regions landed in the top half of the table. For much of the past couple of years the recovery has looked lopsided, with a handful of farming and tourism regions doing the heavy lifting while the big cities lagged, so a broader spread of growth is a welcome shift.
Not every region is sharing in the gains equally, and the headline rankings hide a fair amount of variation in how households are actually feeling. Areas that lean heavily on government employment or that missed out on the strong run in soft commodity prices have had a tougher time, and consumer confidence in parts of the country is still well below where it sat before the cost of living squeeze took hold.
The scoreboard lands at a delicate moment for the wider economy. ASB has forecast March quarter growth of around 0.8 percent, a respectable figure after a long flat patch, but Tuffley warned of “storm clouds” on the horizon. Stubbornly high inflation and the fallout from conflict in the Middle East, which has pushed oil prices around, are both expected to weigh on growth through the rest of the year. Higher fuel costs feed straight into transport, food and just about everything else, and they can quickly eat into the confidence that regions like the Bay of Plenty are now enjoying.
For now, though, the Bay can claim top billing. A good harvest, a busy port and a steady jobs market have combined to put the region back at number one, a reminder that in New Zealand the fortunes of an entire economy can still ride on how well the fruit sells. You can read more on the regional rankings in ASB’s scoreboard, covered here by RNZ.
Has your region felt the lift, or is the recovery passing you by? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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