New Zealand had a very good export month in July and still went backwards. Goods exports rose $881 million, or 14 percent, on July last year, to $7.4 billion. Goods imports rose $2.1 billion, or 28 percent, to $9.3 billion. The gap between the two left a monthly trade deficit of $1.9 billion, according to the overseas merchandise trade figures Stats NZ released on 21 August.
Almost half of that import increase was fuel. Petroleum and petroleum products imports rose $932 million on July last year, an increase of 127 percent. Nothing else came close. Vehicles, parts and accessories were up $328 million, fertilisers up $124 million, and food residues and fodder up $124 million. Take fuel out of the July figures and the trade deficit would have been about a billion dollars instead of nearly two.
The annual picture is where the cost really shows. Over the year ended July 2026, New Zealand imported $12.1 billion of petroleum and petroleum products, up $2.3 billion or 23 percent on the previous year. Total imports for the year were $89.8 billion, up $9.0 billion.
“Fuel accounted for one-quarter of the increase in the total value of imports in the year ended July 2026,” Stats NZ international accounts spokesperson Shanna Dilworth said in the accompanying release.
Set that against what the country earned. Total exports for the year to July were $84.6 billion, up $7.9 billion or 10 percent. The three biggest contributors to that gain were meat and edible offal, up $2.3 billion to $11.9 billion, gold, up $1.3 billion to $2.8 billion, and milk powder, butter and cheese, up $1.2 billion to $24.2 billion.
Which means the extra $2.3 billion New Zealand spent on imported fuel over the past year is almost exactly the extra $2.3 billion it earned from selling meat. A record year at the works, and the whole of the gain went out the door again at the fuel wharf. The annual trade deficit came to $5.2 billion, against $4.2 billion a year earlier.
Spread across the estimated resident population of 5,357,300 at 30 June 2026, the $12.1 billion fuel bill works out at roughly $2,260 for every person in the country over twelve months, and the increase alone at about $430 a head. Households do not write those cheques directly. Most of the fuel goes into freight, aviation, farm machinery, fishing boats and the diesel generators that back up the grid, and it reaches people as the price of a courier parcel, a domestic airfare or a block of cheese. But it is money leaving the country either way.
Where the fuel comes from
New Zealand has not refined its own petrol and diesel since Marsden Point stopped refining in April 2022. It buys the finished product, and it buys it from a very short list of suppliers.
South Korea supplied $5.4 billion of fuel in the year to July, up $1.0 billion or 23 percent. Singapore supplied $3.9 billion, up $615 million or 19 percent. “Together, South Korea and Singapore contributed almost 80 percent of the total value of New Zealand’s fuel imports in the year ended July 2026,” Dilworth said. Malaysia supplied $1.3 billion, up 57 percent, and Japan $772 million, up 225 percent.
That Japanese figure is the interesting one. A more than threefold rise in a year does not happen because New Zealand suddenly preferred Japanese refineries. It happens because the usual barrels were harder to get and cargoes were being sourced wherever they could be found. Newswire looked at the same pattern earlier this year when South Korean refiners came under strain and Singapore and Malaysia picked up the slack.
The country still sells crude oil, just not much and not to itself. New Zealand exported $654 million of crude in the year to July, up $27 million or 4.3 percent, with South Korea taking more than a third of it and Australia the next largest share. In the month of July it exported none at all, which is why crude appears in the monthly figures as an export fall of $39 million, or 100 percent. Crude shipments are lumpy by nature, a tanker either loads in a given month or it does not.
Prices, not volumes
The import figures measure dollars, not litres. Stats NZ was explicit that the rising value of fuel imports over the year was predominantly driven by higher prices rather than by New Zealand burning more of it. The weekly board prices tell the same story at the pump, where diesel began climbing again from late July even as the monthly figures still showed it falling.
Its own price data says the same thing. In the selected price indexes for July 2026, published on 17 August, petrol was 15.1 percent dearer than in July 2025 and diesel 34.9 percent dearer. Both actually fell during the month itself, petrol by 5.7 percent and diesel by 12.1 percent, the third consecutive monthly fall for fuel. Electricity was up 9.5 percent on the year and gas up 10.9 percent, so the energy story is not confined to the pump.
The monthly falls are the useful caution here. Trade data is a rear vision mirror. Cargoes clearing customs in July were bought weeks earlier, at prices set when the market was tighter. Weekly board prices tracked by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment have since turned back up, so the July import bill is neither the peak nor a reliable guide to what September will look like.
The farm gate cost
Fuel is not the only line in the import bill moving on the back of an energy shock. Fertiliser imports rose $124 million in July, an increase of 103 percent on July last year. In the supplementary table Stats NZ publishes for commodities exposed to the Middle East conflict, nitrogen fertiliser imports were $148.8 million in July against $8.0 million in April. Other fertilisers not elsewhere classified went from $6.2 million in April to $72.1 million in July, and phosphate fertilisers from $3.8 million to $10.6 million.
Nitrogen fertiliser is made from ammonia, and ammonia is made from natural gas. When gas prices move, urea prices follow within a season. That flows to pasture growth budgets and eventually to the cost of the meat and dairy that are currently paying the country’s bills. The same table shows imports of palm kernel expeller at $99.7 million in July, against $53.8 million in April, which is a supplementary feed bill rising at the same time.
How long this lasts
Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been curtailed since late February, and roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and gas normally passes through it. Brent crude was trading close to US$90 a barrel in mid-August, about 24 percent above where it sat before the conflict began. The United States Energy Information Administration does not expect Middle Eastern production to return to anything near pre-conflict levels until early 2027.
For a country at the end of a very long supply line, buying refined product from four countries and shipping it most of the way around the world, that timeline matters more than any domestic policy lever. The July trade deficit is not evidence of New Zealanders splurging on imports. Exports are running at record levels and the volumes of fuel are not unusual. It is a price being charged at a chokepoint eleven thousand kilometres away, collected in full, every month, at the wharf.
The next set of figures, for August, is due from Stats NZ on 18 September.
What has the fuel bill changed in your household or your business over the past year? Tell us 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 🙂
Leave a Reply