Auckland has climbed 11 places to become the world’s 75th strongest business ecosystem, but the report that delivered the good news also found the city is still failing to hold on to the money, the companies and the skilled workers that flow through it.
The State of the City 2026 report was released at 5am on Wednesday by the Committee for Auckland. It is the fourth in a benchmarking series written by international research firm The Business of Cities, with Deloitte and the University of Auckland as research partners, and it measures Auckland against a group of ten cities that also includes Austin, Brisbane, Copenhagen, Dublin, Fukuoka, Helsinki, Portland, Tel Aviv and Vancouver.
The innovation numbers are the strongest Auckland has posted in the life of the series. The city now sits 17th on a rising star list of more than 300 cities, the only city in the OECD to make that grade and one of only seven outside Asia. The combined value of Auckland’s investor-backed growth companies has multiplied 19 times since 2019. At 75th overall it is ahead of peer cities Portland and Fukuoka, ahead of Lisbon at 87th and Bogotá at 125th, and well clear of Wellington at 141st and Christchurch at 261st. Total funding growth of 117 per cent was second only to Austin in the peer group.
Mark Thomas, director of the Committee for Auckland, told RNZ the city should not take the improvement as a result in itself. “Even though we are making progress, what’s happening is our peer cities around the world, and other cities in more developing economies, are making faster progress,” he said. “The risk is if we don’t get on top of some of these challenges holding us back we will slip down the rankings.”
The gap the report keeps returning to is between what passes through Auckland and what stays. Auckland handles 73 per cent of New Zealand’s international passenger movements but captures just 29 per cent of the country’s visitor spending, a share that has slipped almost two percentage points since 2019. Of the ten benchmark cities, only Auckland and Helsinki have yet to get total visitor spending back to where it was before Covid. Put plainly, Auckland’s share of the visitor dollar is no better than its share of the population, which for a gateway city is a poor return.
Thomas called it a conversion gap. “We’re not turning enough of these assets and the progress we’re making into stronger productivity, so we still lag as a city compared to those we measure around the world,” he said.
The same pattern shows up in education. Auckland hosts about 55 per cent of New Zealand’s international students, a share higher than most cities anywhere in the world once population is taken into account. The University of Auckland alone earns close to $500 million a year in international tuition and research revenue and has more than 240,000 alumni worldwide. What the city does not do well is turn those students into workers. “We’re good at attracting international students, we’ve got a lot more to do [moving them into] the skilled roles that our business and growth sectors need,” Thomas said.
Companies are leaking out the same way. Auckland holds 48 per cent of New Zealand’s stock of internationally visible, investable firms, and 55 per cent of those launched since 2020. But the report found that New Zealand firms move offshore earlier than firms in peer cities do, weakening Auckland’s role as a home for high-quality growth companies. One reason is where the money sits. Scale-ups take 50 per cent of the venture capital deployed in Auckland, against a global average of 29 per cent, which the authors read as a sign of confidence in the bigger firms and of very thin funding for the earlier-stage ones coming up behind them.
The hard infrastructure numbers look better. Auckland Airport is New Zealand’s third largest port by cargo value, handling more than $36 billion of exports and imports over the most recent 12 months, while Ports of Auckland moves more than a quarter of the country’s containers and more than a third of national import value. Auckland also rose 70 places since 2023 for international meetings hosted and now sits in the top 10 per cent of cities worldwide as a conference destination, the single biggest performance rise in this year’s report.
Housing was one of the few areas where the report found both the numbers and the mood improving. Auckland recorded one of the ten most positive housing delivery trendlines of any major city despite a weakening development cycle, which the authors credit to a decade of planning changes, and measured affordability is now ahead of many close peers. Public perception of housing affordability lifted 18 per cent, the largest gain of any sentiment measure tracked. The catch is that jobs and houses are drifting apart, with new businesses forming fastest in the inner suburbs while most new housing goes to the city fringe or the urban edge.
Explore the data. See how Auckland house prices and the years of household income it takes to buy compare with 17 other New Zealand cities since 2001 in our interactive house price tool.
The uncomfortable finding is that almost none of the improvement has registered with the people Auckland is trying to impress. Overall city brand appeal fell 19 per cent, perceived investability among Asia-Pacific investors fell 28 per cent, and the sense that Auckland offers fulfilling jobs fell 29 per cent. Auckland dropped 41 places on talent concentration and 26 places on overall global city standing. “The rebound is real but uneven, and outside audiences do not yet appear to be taking in the positives,” the report said.
Much of the report’s advice hangs on two things landing at once, the opening of the City Rail Link and delivery of the Auckland Deal agreed with central government earlier this year, the first of New Zealand’s city and regional deals. Auckland’s city centre already generates about 8 per cent of national GDP from a very small footprint, and the authors argue the rail link’s first few years are a narrow window to change how the centre works and how the rest of the city reaches it. Thomas said the deal was an important policy development and that partners had to keep moving where they disagreed, naming the visitor levy as one issue that had stalled and the Advanced Technology Institute earmarked for Auckland as one that should be set up faster.
The report sets out what progress would look like by 2030. Auckland would be in the global top 60 startup ecosystems rather than 75th, in the top 75 worldwide for international conventions, and its universities would be co-publishing 10 per cent of their research with industry rather than the current 7 per cent, which would put the city on the peer median. On present form the momentum is there. Whether Auckland converts it is the question the report leaves open.
Does Auckland need to sell itself harder, or fix the basics first? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
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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