Sources & method
Sources, method, and what we could not find
Every figure on this site traces to a dated public release. This page lists them all, says what each one can and cannot support, and then does the part nobody else does: names the datasets that do not exist. The gaps shaped this site more than the data did.
0
Free, official New Zealand datasets giving the cost of painting a house. Not one — which is why no page here shows a sourced price per square metre, and why every competitor that does is showing you an unsourced number. What can honestly be said instead.
Source verification, this site · 30 July 2026
The datasets
What is behind the numbers
Read the last column first. It is the one that matters: a dataset that cannot support the claim being made of it is worse than no dataset.
| What it gives us | Source | Licence | Period | What it can and cannot support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dwelling alteration and new-build consents | Stats NZ — Building consents issued | CC BY 4.0 | 2025.06 – 2026.05 | Supports: the scale and direction of consented alteration work by local board, and declared value per consent. Does not support: a price for a job, or any $/m² for renovation — the alterations series carries no floor area. |
| New dwellings consented, by suburb | Stats NZ — New dwellings consented by statistical area 2 | CC BY 4.0 | 2025-06 – 2026-05 | Supports: how much new housing a suburb is consenting. Does not support: anything about existing houses. Four suburbs cannot be matched one-to-one to the release and are shown as "not separately reported", never as zero. |
| Median weekly rent and bond counts | MBIE (Tenancy Services) rental bond data | Published by Tenancy Services for reuse with attribution | Q1 2026 | Supports: the rent a repaint must be justified against, per suburb, with the sample size shown. Does not support: house prices, owner-occupier housing, or a suburb’s housing stock — it is a rental sample of 16641 bonds. |
| Dwelling-type mix, by suburb | MBIE (Tenancy Services) rental bond data | Published by Tenancy Services for reuse with attribution | Q1 2026 | Supports: the honest proxy for what a suburb is built of — house, apartment, townhouse. Does not support: dwelling age or cladding material, which no New Zealand dataset records per suburb. |
| Unitary Plan base zones | Auckland Council Unitary Plan base zones (CC BY 4.0) | Registered CC BY 4.0 · see the licence note below | 2026-07-30 | Supports: what the zoning map mostly is across a suburb, sampled. Does not support: the zoning of any particular property. Only Auckland Council can tell you what applies to an address. |
| Special Character Areas and historic heritage overlays | Auckland Council — Special Character Areas Overlay (Residential and Business) | Registered CC BY 4.0 · see the licence note below | 2026-07-30 | Supports: whether an overlay reaches a suburb, how many areas, which types, and an estimated share by point sampling. Does not support: an exact area, a boundary, or a determination about a property. 53 of 246 suburbs are affected. |
| Suburb boundaries and local board areas | Stats NZ Statistical Area 2 (2018) boundaries and local board areas | CC BY 4.0 | 2026-07-30 | Supports: which statistical areas make up a suburb, and which local board it sits in — the join that makes consent data usable at suburb level. Does not support: suburb boundaries as a legal or postal fact. |
| Cost and price indexes | Stats NZ — Business price indexes (PPI and Capital Goods Price Index) | CC BY 4.0 | March 2026 quarter · CPI June 2026 quarter | Supports: how paint, building work and construction wages have moved, nominally and after removing consumer inflation. Does not support: the level of any price. An index is a movement, not a dollar figure. |
| Trade pay bands and live job counts | Tahatū Career Navigator (Tertiary Education Commission) | CC BY 4.0 — attribution required: Tertiary Education Commission — Tahatū Career Navigator | 2026-07-30 | Supports: a modelled labour component built from real pay bands, and the state of trade demand. Does not support: a charge-out rate — what a painter is paid is not what a job is priced at. Photos and videos from this source are not licensed for reuse and none are used. |
| Auckland painting-season model | Open-Meteo Historical Weather API (ECMWF ERA5 / ERA5-Land reanalysis) | Underlying ERA5 reanalysis: CC BY 4.0 (Copernicus Climate Change Service). | 1991-01-01 – 2020-12-31 (30 years, 10958 daily records) | Supports: how many days a month meet every coating application limit at once, and how often three dry days run together. Does not support: a forecast, or conditions at your address — it is a reanalysis grid cell, not a weather station. Only derived monthly statistics are published; the daily series is never shipped. |
Every source is named in full, including the exact file where a release publishes several series — that string finds it. Licence terms are the source’s own; where one requires particular attribution wording, that wording is printed next to the figure it applies to.
Compiled by this site from each dataset’s own metadata · 2026-07-30
The useful part
What we looked for and could not find
Six absences. Each one is a place where the industry standard is to publish a number anyway, and each one is the reason a page on this site says less than a competitor’s.
- 01
A New Zealand cost-per-trade dataset
There is no free, official figure for what it costs to paint a house in New Zealand. Stats NZ publishes declared consent values (the applicant’s own estimate, excluding land, inconsistent on GST), cost indexes (movement, not level) and wages. None of them is a price. The two commercial cost libraries that come closest — QV CostBuilder and the former Rawlinsons handbook — are paid, licensed products this site is not permitted to republish. This is the single most important absence on the site, and it is why no page here shows a sourced price per square metre.
- 02
Dwelling age or cladding material in the Census
The Census of Population and Dwellings records neither how old a dwelling is nor what it is clad in. So there is no way to say what share of a given Auckland suburb is pre-1980 timber, or monolithic, or brick, from official data. National cladding shares exist only in the BRANZ House Condition Survey, cited on this site as national figures and never presented as a suburb’s mix.
- 03
Open building-consent records from Auckland Council
Auckland Council publishes no open dataset of issued building consents — no address-level register, and no per-suburb counts. Consent data on this site therefore comes from Stats NZ, which publishes it by local board and never below that. That is why suburb pages carry their board’s market rather than their own.
- 04
NIWA CliFlo climate data
The obvious source for a New Zealand climate model is NIWA’s CliFlo station database. It has been retired, and its data is in any case not licensed for commercial reuse. The painting-season model on this site is therefore built from ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis, which is openly licensed — and which is a grid cell rather than a station, a limitation stated on the page that uses it.
- 05
Reproducible BRANZ research
BRANZ study reports are the best evidence available on New Zealand house condition, and they are all rights reserved. Individual figures are cited here with attribution — the share of houses with deteriorating exterior paintwork, the share with more than one cladding type — and no table, chart or passage is reproduced. If you want the detail, the reports are the place to get it.
- 06
A per-property answer of any kind
Nothing on this site can tell you what applies to your address. Zoning, overlays, heritage schedules and consent requirements are described here as published rules and sampled maps. Only Auckland Council can make a determination about a property, and where the work turns out to be restricted building work under the Building Act 2004 it must be carried out or supervised by a Licensed Building Practitioner.
The licence conflict
Auckland Council data, and why this site publishes only aggregates
Worth stating plainly, because it explains why the character-area figures on this site are percentages and counts rather than maps.
Auckland Council open data is registered CC BY 4.0 on data.govt.nz. At the same time, the terms attached to the layer itself say something else: "You are not permitted to copy or republish any substantial amount of the information from this website without the prior written consent of Auckland Council."
Those two statements conflict. This site applies the conservative reading of them. So it holds and publishes only derived aggregates — booleans, counts and percentages describing planning constraints. No polygon geometry, no place names from the schedules, no schedule identifiers, and no attribute records. All the spatial work was done server-side with attribute-only and count-only queries, and the area shares are point-sampled estimates precisely because measuring them exactly would have required downloading the geometry the licence protects.
Source: Plans and Places, Auckland Council (Unitary Plan overlays).
Questions people actually ask
Why is there no price per square metre anywhere on this site?
Because no free New Zealand source publishes one, and the paid cost libraries that come closest are licensed products we cannot republish. An unsourced per-square-metre figure is the industry norm and it is the thing this site exists to not do. What can honestly be said instead.
Can I reuse the figures on this site?
Cite the original source rather than this site — each is named and dated so you can go straight to it. Where a licence requires particular wording, that wording is printed next to the figure. The Auckland Council material here is derived aggregate only and is not a redistribution of their layers.
How current is all this?
Each row carries its own period, because they do not move together: consents monthly, rents and indexes quarterly, the climate model a 30-year baseline. The site was last updated 2026-07-30.
What if I find a mistake?
Then the source line is doing its job. Send it through the brief with the page and the figure, and it gets corrected — a wrong number that cites its source is fixable, which is the whole argument for citing sources.