Employment Change QoQ

Employment Change QoQ is the seasonally adjusted quarterly percent change in employed people, meaning seasonal patterns are removed for comparison, running since October 1985. It comes from the Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS), a continuous nationwide household survey run by Stats NZ and published inside quarterly Labour market statistics. It covers the working-age population, defined as people aged 15 and over who usually live in New Zealand, excluding institutions and prisons. It counts each employed person once, even with 2 jobs, so it does not count jobs or benefit rolls.

Interviewing runs continuously across the 13 week survey quarter, and each interview uses the prior Sunday to Saturday week as its reference. The first interview is face to face at home, and later interviews are by phone where possible. Stats NZ releases Labour market statistics about 5 weeks after quarter end, within 6 weeks, at 10:45am New Zealand time. Releases usually fall in the first week of February, May, August and November.

Each release also covers unemployment, underutilisation, participation, hours, wages and jobs. Delivery can lag for reasons beyond Stats NZ control, and adjusted history may revise slightly each quarter or after each census.

Employment shifts when hiring, hours and labour supply move across groups, sectors and job types.

• Total employed: the base for the quarterly change, covering all employed people aged 15 and over.
• Full-time and part-time employed: the first covers 30 or more usual hours a week and captures the cyclical core. The second covers under 30 hours and absorbs hours margin shifts, and the two need not sum to the adjusted total.
• Men and women: shows the sex breakdown from indirect adjustment, with both parts summing to total employed.
• Age, ethnic and regional groups: shows who and where employment moved.
• Industry, occupation and status in employment: shows which sectors and occupations drove change and separates employees, employers, the self employed and unpaid family workers.
• Hours worked, actual and usual: captures work intensity alongside headcount, meaning number of people.

In the September 2024 quarter, released November 6, 2024, seasonally adjusted employment fell 0.5% to 2,927,000, down 0.4% on the year. The employment rate fell to 67.8% from 68.4% as population grew 0.3% to 4,318,000. Men were at 71.9% from 72.6% and women at 63.8% from 64.2%.

Unemployed rose 3.3% to 148,000, lifting unemployment to 4.8% from 4.6%, while participation fell 0.5 points to 71.2%. Underutilisation still eased to 11.6% from 11.8%, with 367,000 underutilised down 2.5%, as lower underemployment offset higher unemployment.

1. Select sample: a stratified 2 stage clustered sample picks neighbourhood blocks, called primary sampling units, with chance proportional to size, then households inside them. Households stay 8 quarters, with 1 in 8 replaced each quarter.
2. Selection weight: each person gets a design weight equal to 1 divided by selection chance, so larger blocks get smaller weights.
3. Calibration: weights are adjusted, absorbing non response, to match population benchmarks by age, sex, Maori status and 12 regions.
4. Imputation: missing answers are filled from similar donors to raise the responding base.
5. Level estimate: employed people are summed by final weight to give unadjusted levels.
6. Seasonal adjustment: the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program, a standard seasonal filter, removes seasonal patterns, rerun over full history each quarter. Indirect method adjusts men and women separately then sums them.
7. Quarterly change: the indicator divides the quarter to quarter move in unrounded adjusted levels by the prior quarter and multiplies by 100. For example with illustrative inputs, from 2,941,300 to 2,927,100 gives about -0.5%.