Twenty-five years of migration in two charts
From January 2001 to the most recent monthly Stats NZ release, the tool below tracks every long-term migrant arrival and departure that Statistics New Zealand counted, plus the resulting change in the resident population by ethnic group and by country of birth across five Censuses.
The flow chart shows the news story — month by month, country by country, what the international migration figures actually look like. The stock chart shows the consequence — the resident population of New Zealand, who lives here, how the mix has shifted since 1996.
Scroll through the tool to play the data forward in time. The flow section advances one month per small scroll, the stock section one Census every few seconds.
Talk to anyone over forty who grew up in Auckland and they will tell you, unprompted, that the city has changed. The same is true of Hamilton, of parts of Wellington, of the Bay of Plenty. The country is more diverse than it was; the cities are more diverse than the country; and the change has happened in roughly one human generation.
This page is the data behind that perception. Two layers, both built from Statistics New Zealand’s open data.
The first layer is the flow — the monthly tally of long-term migrant arrivals and departures, by citizenship, visa type, age, and country of last permanent residence, all the way back to January 2001. Each particle in the visualisation is a person crossing the border. The big number at top-left is the net for that month — arrivals minus departures. The era caption underneath labels the macro phase: the long 2000s boom, the GFC retreat, the record decade through to 2019, the COVID closure, the post-2022 reopening surge, and the more recent reopening of the brain drain to Australia.
The second layer is the stock — who actually lives in New Zealand, broken down two ways. The first toggle is by self-declared ethnic group, anchored at the Census points of 1996, 2001, 2006, 2013, 2018 and 2023. The shape of the change is the central story of modern New Zealand demographics. The Asian ethnic group went from 195,000 in 1996 to 974,000 in 2023 — a five-fold increase in 27 years. Māori grew from 573,000 to 911,000 over the same period. Pacific Peoples doubled. European grew only modestly in absolute terms and its share of the total population fell.
The second toggle is by country of birth. This is the cleaner statistical lens — every person is born in one country, and the answer doesn’t drift across generations the way ethnicity self-identification sometimes does. The Asian-born resident population in 2023 stood at 576,000 — more than the European-born (354,000) and the Oceanian-born (275,000) combined. The picture has changed.
The shape of the flow
The annual story sits below the surface of the monthly numbers. Net migration averaged roughly 30,000 a year through the 2000s, dominated by Asian student and work-visa arrivals and partly offset by a steady drift of New Zealanders across the Tasman. The Global Financial Crisis interrupted it briefly between 2008 and 2012 — NZ-citizen departures to Australia ballooned past 50,000 a year and net migration touched zero on one or two prints — but the dominant trend through the decade was still inbound.
From 2013 the numbers stepped up. Net migration peaked above 70,000 in the year to mid-2016, the highest reading the series had ever recorded at that point. Indian and Chinese student and work arrivals dominated. The pressure on Auckland’s housing market through those years is one of the things that came out of this. The Reserve Bank introduced loan-to-value restrictions in October 2013 and tightened them twice more; central government tried a foreign-buyer registration and a bright-line capital-gains test. Neither slowed the city down for very long.
COVID-19 closed the borders almost completely from March 2020 to mid-2022. The flow stage shows the closure as a near-flat line for two and a half years. When the borders reopened the rebound was the largest single migration event in New Zealand history. Net migration in the year to October 2023 hit 137,000 — almost double the 2016 peak. Filipino, Indian, Chinese and Fijian work-visa arrivals dominated. The country added roughly the population of Tauranga in twelve months.
By 2024 the cycle had turned again. Stats NZ’s most recent figures show NZ-citizen departures to Australia climbing back toward multi-decade highs. The post-2022 surge has receded into something closer to the long-run average.
The shape of the stock
The Census tells the consequence. In 1996, the ethnic composition of New Zealand was roughly 80 percent European, 15 percent Māori, 6 percent Pacific, 5 percent Asian, with a small MELAA presence not yet broken out as a separate group. In 2023 the same population was about 70 percent European, 18 percent Māori, 9 percent Pacific, 17 percent Asian, 2 percent MELAA — and a meaningful share of the total identifies with more than one group, which is why the percentages add to more than 100.
Country of birth tells the same story without the ethnic-identification ambiguity. The proportion of New Zealanders born overseas reached 28.8 percent at the 2023 Census, up from roughly 20 percent in 2001. The composition of that overseas-born population has shifted dramatically — Asian-born residents now outnumber European-born for the first time in NZ’s modern history, and the Pacific-born share has stayed roughly stable.
None of this is a value judgement. The maths is the maths. The picture of who lives in New Zealand looks substantively different in 2026 than it did at the turn of the century, and the migration data above is most of the reason why.
Where the numbers come from, and where we estimated
Arrivals are taken directly from the Stats NZ International Migration monthly release — the citizenship by visa by country of last permanent residence CSV, March 2026 release. Every long-term-migrant arrival from January 2001 to the most recent month, with the full citizenship × visa × country breakdown.
Departures at the national and age/sex level are also direct from Stats NZ. The monthly release does not publish departures by country of next residence at the same fine granularity — the largest splits available are by citizenship and by visa type. Departure totals by country shown in the leaderboard are estimated, by allocating the national monthly departure total in proportion to each country’s share of arrivals in the same month. This is rough but directional.
The ethnicity series is built from the Stats NZ Estimated Resident Population by ethnic group at 30 June, anchored at six Census points (1996, 2001, 2006, 2013, 2018, 2023). Between Census points the line is linearly interpolated. The five groups shown are the top level of the standard NZ ethnic group classification — European, Māori, Pacific Peoples, Asian, MELAA (Middle Eastern / Latin American / African). Ethnicity in NZ Census data is multi-response (a single person can tick multiple groups), which is why the sum of the five groups exceeds the total population. The chart shows the raw group totals as Stats NZ publishes them, without re-allocating overlaps.
The country-of-birth series is anchored to the 2023 Census birthplace totals (a direct count) and walked backwards and forwards using estimated annual net inflow per region — net inflow being published arrivals less an empirically calibrated departure-to-arrival ratio per region (Oceania 0.85, Asia 0.40, Europe 0.65, Americas 0.70, Africa and Middle East 0.30). The MELAA Census total has been split roughly Africa 55 percent, Middle East 35 percent, Latin America 10 percent. Treat the trajectory as directional rather than precise to the nearest thousand. The Census anchor and the 2023 figure are direct counts; the in-between years are estimated.
Why the migration data tracks country, not ethnicity: Stats NZ records the citizenship of every traveller and the country of last or next permanent residence. It does not record ethnicity at the border. A New Zealand-born Indian person returning from a year in Singapore is a New Zealand citizen arriving from Singapore. The ethnicity story in the second part of the tool is therefore the Census story, not the migration story; the migration data tells us why the Census story has changed shape.
Sources: Stats NZ International migration: March 2026 release; 2023 Census Place & Ethnic Group Summaries; Stats NZ National Population Estimates. Tool refreshed monthly when Stats NZ posts the next International Migration release.
Tell us what you see
If the demographic shift in your suburb, your school, your sports club has matched what the tool shows — or hasn’t — we’d like to hear from you. Drop a comment below and tell us where you live and what changed.