New Zealand’s average asking rent reached $637 a week in August, up 1.5 percent on the same month a year earlier, but the national number hides five regions where rents have gone backwards over the past 12 months.
The figures come from realestate.co.nz, which publishes a monthly average of the asking rent on every residential rental listed on its site. August’s $637 was $9 a week above the $628 recorded in August 2025, or about $468 over a full year.
Marlborough recorded the sharpest annual increase, with the average weekly asking rent rising 8.2 percent from $511 to $553. Canterbury was up 5.7 percent to $622, Otago rose 5.6 percent to $653 and Waikato lifted 4.1 percent to $587, a record for that region. Wellington rose 3.6 percent to $621.
Rents fell on the West Coast, down 6.5 percent, in Gisborne, down 5.2 percent, in Southland, down 4.8 percent, in ManawatΕ« and Whanganui, down 4.5 percent, and in Wairarapa, down 3.3 percent.
Sarah Wood, chief executive of realestate.co.nz, said the spread was a reminder that there is no single rental market in this country.
“A national increase of 1.5% suggests a relatively settled picture, but that average hides some significant differences around the country,” Wood said.
“A renter in Marlborough or Canterbury is experiencing a very different market from someone on the West Coast or in Southland. Population movement, employment, local economies, and of course supply, can all influence demand, and those factors don’t move uniformly across New Zealand.”
Auckland, by far the largest rental market, barely moved. Its average asking rent rose 0.8 percent from about $684 to $689, an increase of $5 a week.
“When our largest rental market moves less than 1% in a year, it naturally has a stabilising influence on the national average,” Wood said. “But that national stability shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of movement.”
Asking rents describe what landlords want for properties coming onto the market, not what sitting tenants are already paying, so they tend to turn before the official measures do. The official measure of rents actually paid is telling a slower and much weaker story. Stats NZ’s actual rentals for housing index, which sits inside the consumers price index, rose just 0.5 percent in the year to the June 2026 quarter. Newswire calculated that annual change from the index numbers published with the June quarter release. It is the smallest annual increase in that series since the December 2001 quarter.
That matters more than the headline percentage suggests. Consumer prices rose 4.1 percent in the year to June, driven mainly by petrol, diesel, electricity and council rates. Rents rose 0.5 percent over the same 12 months. For a household whose rent did not change, the share of the weekly budget going on rent shrank over the year, even as almost everything else got dearer. Rent is still the largest single item in most tenants’ budgets, but it is no longer the part of that budget growing fastest.
Kelvin Davidson, chief property economist at Cotality, told RNZ that asking rents were a reasonable guide to what tenants eventually pay.
“But I think probably asking rents are a pretty good indicator of actual rents, probably a better indicator for actual rents than asking sales prices are for actual prices,” Davidson said.
He said the regional pattern in rents matched what was happening in house prices, where provincial markets were holding up better than the main centres.
“With house prices we’re definitely seeing support from the provincial economy, farmers doing well, that’s putting a bit of cash into provincial economies so I’m not surprised to see rents going up in markets like Canterbury and Otago,” he said.
Davidson said the long run of falling rents looked close to finished.
“We’ve seen rents fall for 12 or 18 months and if you look at Stats New Zealand measures, if you look at the MBIE bonds system, they’ll lag behind these asking rent figures a bit, this is probably a really early indicator but we’ve been seeing probably for two months now, maybe three months, hints of a floor for rents,” he said.
He was careful not to overstate what that means for tenants. “We’re not saying renting is easy or anything and rents are still quite high but when you look at them relative to income, there has been a big adjustment,” Davidson said.
Explore the data. See how house prices and the years of household income it takes to buy have moved across 18 New Zealand cities since 2001 in our interactive house price tool.
Supply is the other half of the picture, and it has barely shifted. There were 8,379 properties listed for rent at the end of August, only 0.9 percent more than the 8,303 available a year earlier. Wood said the small movement in total stock suggested properties were still moving through the market rather than piling up.
“There are a number of forces that could be contributing to the movement we’re seeing. Net migration has started to pick up again, our population continues to grow, and people are constantly forming and changing households as they move for work, study, relationships and different stages of life,” Wood said. “At the same time, a softer labour market and ongoing affordability pressures may mean some people who might otherwise have considered buying are renting for longer.”
Landlords are working against a cost line of their own. The Reserve Bank lifted the official cash rate by 25 basis points to 2.75 percent on 2 September, and banks passed the full increase through to mortgage rates while lifting some savings rates by as little as five basis points. Council rates and payments rose 8.8 percent in the year to June, well ahead of what landlords could add to a rent. What the August figures suggest is that in most of the country tenants simply have not had the money to absorb those costs, and where they have, in Marlborough, Canterbury, Otago and Waikato, rents have moved quickly.
Whether the floor Davidson describes turns into a new upswing depends largely on migration and jobs. Pay growth is running ahead of rent growth for now. The labour cost index, which measures the price of a fixed quality of work rather than what people actually take home, rose 2.8 percent in the year to June against rent inflation of 0.5 percent. That gap is the first genuine relief renters have had since the pandemic, and on the evidence of the past three months it may not last much longer.
Are rents rising or falling where you live, and has your own rent moved this 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 π
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